Observation-based proactive OHS outcome indicators – Validity of the Elmeri+ method

A lack of effective proactive indicators is probably the single biggest problem faced in occupational safety and health management today. Most proactive indicators presented in OHS guides and research papers are, in fact, activity indicators; i.e. they indicate what is being done in the organisation. Use of activity indicators is common in bureaucratic management practices. In modern learning organisations the focus should be on results, so that employees can use their own innovativeness to achieve set targets. Real-time outcome indicators are needed in order to be able to monitor and improve the effectiveness of OHS activities. Standards observation is a promising alternative for monitoring the safety level of an organisation. The objective of this paper was to study the validity of the Elmeri+ observation method in predicting the accident risk of a workplace. The study material consisted of 128 companies within the mechanical engineering, the metal industry and the electronics industry. Five observation rounds were carried out in each company over 3 years, and the results were compared with the aggregated accident figures during the same years. The study showed that the correlations between the Elmeri+ index and aggregated accident-based safety indicators were statistically significant and considerable in practice. The company groups with the worst index values, i.e. lower than 75%, lost 3–4 times more working hours per worker due to accidents than the best company groups, whose index values were higher than 90%. The paper also discusses the advances and limitations as well as the success factors of the development of observation-based monitoring tools.

► Result based indicators are needed to renew the bureaucratic safety management mode.
► Standard OHS observation methods produce a new set of real time result indicators.
► Validity of the Elmeri+ observation was studied in three manufacturing industries.
► Observed Elmeri+ index correlated significantly with accident based indicators.
► Companies with best Elmeri+ index had 74% lower accident rate than the worst ones.