A global benchmark for organisational safety performance

Safety benchmarking company Global Safety Index (GSI) is offering organisations a global benchmarking service on their safety performance and is said to be the first business in the world to do so. Looking at lead and lag indicators, as well as safety culture and safety leadership, GSI allows organisations to benchmark their safety performance against industry performance and other leading organisations globally.

The company was founded in 2013 as a place for organisations looking to understand their safety cultural strengths and weaknesses and profile for focused cultural improvement. GSI Managing Director Ben Wilson said, “We came up with the idea for Global Safety Index when we realised that globally there was no readily accessible safety benchmark that enabled organisations to determine how they are currently performing internally and then compare this externally to high-performance organisations.”

The company also works with its members to build the measurement of safety culture into their risk management audits, helping them move along the curve of compliance to a stronger emphasis on culture and leadership. According to Wilson, “Profiling employees’ safety leadership capability allows businesses to plan and prioritise resource allocation and deliver a targeted skills and capability improvement approach to areas most needed.”

Global Safety Index membership and support is rapidly expanding, with early adopters including Siemens, Woolworths, Coles and Westpac. For the company’s report ‘2013 Key Industry Insights & Outlook For 2014’, more than 4700 Australian participants from four different industries - manufacturing, logistics, business services and utilities - were surveyed.

Among the key findings was the need for a better and more holistic measure of safety performance that includes safety culture and safety capability. The report also suggested that companies still need to do more work on embedding safety into their work environments and particularly their reward and recognition systems.

The release of the report coincided with another report by Citi Research in January 2014, which showed that out of 117 companies, only 78 reported injury metrics. Wilson said the Citi report reiterates GSI’s findings, although “we do believe that we will see a big shift in 2014”.

“We expect that executive teams will begin to ask for real-time data that accurately reflects not only current performance, but also indicates the climate within an organisation which can be measured and then used in performance improvement strategies going forward,” said Wilson.