Safety goals

Safety goals should focus on process activities that can contribute to injury prevention. Workers need to discuss what they can do to reduce injuries, from reporting and analyzing near hits to conducting safety audits of environmental conditions and work practices.

The safety steering committee I worked with recently wanted to increase daily interpersonal communications regarding safety. They set a goal for their group to achieve 500 safety communications within the following month. To do this they had to develop a way to measure and track safety communications. They designed a wallet-sized SMART card for recording communications with persons about safety, and one member of the group volunteered to tally and graph the daily card totals.

The work of this group depicts safety as process-focused and achievement-oriented, rather than the standard and less effective outcome-focused and failure-oriented approach promoted with injury-based goals.