Facilities managers that track less-intensive safety incidents on their sites can get a better picture of the risks their contractors pose than if they just track total recordable incidents — the industry standard for the last several decades, a safety specialist says.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has required reporting of total recordable incidents since 1970. The goal is to reduce what the safety industry calls SIF — serious injuries and fatalities — by giving facilities managers and their contractors visibility into an operation’s safety weaknesses.
But tracking total recordable incidents isn’t enough, says Dave Tibbetts, chief safety officer at contractor management software company Highwire and the former manager of construction safety at Harvard University and Logan International Airport in Boston.
“The recordable rate has been a huge success,” Tibbetts told Griffin Hamilton on the Modern Facilities Management podcast. “Hundreds of thousands of fewer workers are getting injured today compared to 30 years ago… . But reducing the frequencies of all incidents has not resulted in a similar decline in fatalities.”
A study by the Construction Safety Research Alliance in 2021 found little correlation between total recordable incidents and SIF incidents, in part because site managers tend to underreport incidents and differ in their case management approach.
The number of total recordable incidents reported “is almost entirely random,” says the report. “Empirical analysis revealed that changes in TRIR are due to 96% to 98% random variation. This is logically confirmed by the fact that recordable injuries do not occur in predictable patterns or regular intervals. This is likely because safety is a complex phenomenon that is impacted by many factors.”
Because of the unreliability of TRIR, Tibbetts says, a contractor you’re thinking of hiring or whose contract you’re thinking of renewing could seem to have a strong safety record based on its TRIR performance, but that doesn’t give you full visibility into the risks the contractor poses.
“You can have an organization that has exceptional recordable rates, but they might have a high volume of SIF potential exposures, and they might not have visibility into those,” he said. “At the same time, you can have an organization with a higher recordable rate, but they’re executing on a high level when it comes to planning for and mitigating risks associated with those higher activities.”
Tibbetts recommends supplementing contractors’ TRIR data with data on what he calls potential SIF events. “It could be a near-miss like a falling object that lands near an employee,” he said, “or an employee subject to a significant fall, or exposed to energized electrical or working in an unprotected trench or excavation.”
None of these incidents would be included in a TRIR report unless they resulted in first-aid treatment or some other step taken, like having the worker take the rest of the day off. If there is a pattern of them, however, they can say a lot about the safety practices of the contractor.
Tibbetts recommends having a conversation with contractors to get insight into their process for minimizing these less-serious incidents.
“You want to have these conversations in the spirit of improvement,” he said. “Frame a conversation like this: Imagine you had that [small incident] data at your fingertips and talk about the risks we identified…. What are we going to do to ensure those risks are addressed in the future?”
No two companies are going to track and record small-incident data the same way because, unlike with TRIR data, there is no uniformity, Tibbetts said. TRIR data collection and reporting are standardized by OSHA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The push for managers to track and record small incident data is being driven by industry.
Uniformity could come in time, but even without it, he said, it’s worth tracking the incidents in your own way.
“Any time, as an asset owner, you hire a contractor, you’re taking on risk,” he said. “Significant or moderate. It depends on who you hire. What are you doing to make sure you understand who you’re hiring?”
Tibbetts expects the tracking of this data to become common soon enough. “No question, adoption is going to grow,” he said. “The train has left the station. More asset owners, general contractors and facilities managers are going to adopt this approach.”
