Audit scores

Rather than have each location manager draft a safety program, one was provided them containing the basics with the understanding that they were to flesh it out to suit their particular operation and needs. Rather soon, facilities improved their safety program efforts to the extent that audit scores continued to climb while workplace injuries continued to decline. The higher audit scores provided a friendly competition among facilities to excel. 

Audit scores continued to climb, reflecting continued improvement in safety management. Results became so good that it was decided to have some locations quality for OSHA s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP). For that program, superior results must be demonstrated and the location must meet the requirements of a thorough safety management audit. 

Supervisors and facility managers were held accountable for then-safety programs. They were the safety directors. The number of injuries at each site had to be reduced and the audit score had to be at least 91% for them to receive a bonus or an increase as a result of their annual performance reviews. 

Audit scores Many parts of a safety program have an audit component. After the first audit of a work cell or department, a benchmark number... 

One of the objectives of the NOSA system was to present an ongoing challenge and provide encouragement and reward. The audit score is measured against the achievement of prescribed minimum standards and is converted to a percentage. In... 

Once a formal safety system is in place, managers are clear on their safety role and responsibilities. They are participants in safety that is facilitated by them being a member of the safety leadership team committee or other safety committee on their level. Their job descriptions also contain their safety dnties, actions, and functions. Often performance ratings are linked to key performance areas that are proactive safety activities, such as scoring 90% or more on monthly honsekeeping inspections, achieving an internal safety audit score of 85%, etc. 

Managers want to be the best, and safety competition (not based on adjustable injury rates) is one of the key ingredients in safety culture building. Internal honse-keeping scores and audit scores are examples of where competitive spirits may be kindled. In the process, safety culture is being built. 

External auditors were brought in on an annual basis to audit both the mine and the plant, and excellent audit scores were achieved. The mine was rated three-star and the plant four-star. Star ratings were restricted because of NCSA s policy of incorporating the injury rate as one of the grading criteria. 

Computer skills An efficient audit system will be coustructed in an electronic format in order to calculate the audit score and share information throughout the school or school system. At a basic level, this will require the auditor to be able to use the software in which the audit is created and the medium used to communicate information regarding the audit electronically. 

The metric of audit scores is a proactive measurement of safety performance. Audits are used to measure the safety performance of a school against established organizational standards or government regulations. Questions are asked related to each aspect of a safety program being audited. The responses to these questions on the audit are then translated into a score that can serve as the metric that is used to measure performance. Types of safety audits cau include ... 

Downstream to upstream in real time Behavior-based safety measurements are more than a review of the injury roster. Although recordable and lost-time injuries are one measurement of safety success, they are not the only measure. Looking at injury data is downstream, or reactive. BBS encourages organizations to look upstream at proactive data hke unsafe acts from safety observations, safety audit scores, inspection results, etc. The problem with this proactive data, however, is at least two-fold. 

There is very little published work on the reliabihty of audit systems. Kuusisto (2001) conducted an extensive study on the reliability of auditing methods. His dissertation reviews the literature on this topic and reports an original study of the inter-observer reliability of the D S method and of an improved audit method labeled Method for Industrial Safety and Health Activity Assessment (MISHA). In an initial test, Kuusisto audited six companies in the United States, using the D S method. He compared the audit scores he recorded with the scores of internal audits conducted by a company employee who also used the D S method. Statistical testing indicated that the rehabihty was poor to moderate. In only one of the companies did the reliability reach the moderate level. Two companies reached the fair level, two reached the slight level, and one was poor. 

There is some evidence that supports the criterion-based validity of other audits. Uusitalo and Mattila (1989) found a fair correlation between audit scores and accident rates in 11 industrial companies. There are other studies described by Uusitalo that show some evidence of validity. Pringle and Brown (1990) report a 12 percent drop in the incident rates among the 2,395 North American companies that used the ISRS in the period 1978-1979. The apparent lack of a control group of similar companies that did not use the ISRS and the fact that the improvonent was relatively small leads us to some reservation about the conclusion that the ISRS was responsible for this change. It would not be surprising to find that a sample of similar companies that used methods for safety improvement that did not involve audits showed the same 12 percent reduction in accident rates. 

The strongest positive evidence for criterion-based validation comes from a study by Ray et al. (2000) of 25 manufacturing plants in Alabama. They developed an audit on the maintenance function of these plants. The audits were conducted by outside auditors from the University of Alabama. Audit scores were correlated with the recordable rate. Using a rank-order correlation, they found a statistically significant negative correlation between the audit scores and the incident rate, meaning that the better the audit score, the lower the incident rate. 

Validity is another question. We have said that audits typically have content-based validity. Testing for criterion-based validity may be beyond the scope of many situations for which safety professionals would like to apply audits. Certainly in a company with a small population and relatively low accident rates, there would probably not be enough data to find a relationship between audit scores and accident rates. An alternative would be to look for a relationship between audit scores and the scores on our safety survey (see Chapter 8). Since the scores of this survey are extensively validated as measures of system performance, they can serve as a criterion against which to test audits. 

The validity should also be tested whenever possible. Do the plants with the best long-term safety records have the best audit scores In this test it is essential that auditors not know the long-term record of plants they are auditing. Otherwise, the validity test is biased. 

Most organizations have discovered that two locations can have practically identical audit scores on safety-enabling elements, identical or near-identical technology, and similar workforces, and yet report widely different incident frequency rates. Enabling elements are necessary but not sufficient for excellent safety performance. As we will see, there is a great deal more to safety success. 

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