The Executive Safety Dashboard

On the day of his retirement, the head of EHS at a large, global manufacturing company sent a note filled with advice for his friends and colleagues. “Stop the Spitting Contest,” it began, and he went on to describe safety scorecard reviews that amounted to little more than 'spitting contests’ that nobody wanted to lose.?A great deal of time and energy went into managing numbers in that company, time that everyone knew could have saved someone’s life, if it had been spent actually managing risk. Safety dashboard management remained his great frustrations over my colleague's long career.

This story illustrates how powerful an executive’s attention is, and how important it is to focus that attention in the right places. Your safety dashboard should inform questions like “Is our safety improvement strategy working? Are our efforts building culture or damaging it? Where is our SIF potential changing?

The problem is, very few dashboards contain the information you need and even if they do, most are so poorly designed you can’t see it.

This article, just published to our website, is a guide to developing a dashboard that help you focus on the things that will help your organization improve.?It is written for CEOs, senior leaders, and your EHS partners.?It will discuss what metrics you should have on your dashboard, how to display the information, and a few other considerations.

Enjoy!