Are TRIR and DART rates are an accurate measuring stick of a company's safety culture?
I believe the TRIR and DART rates are outdated and OSHA needs to revamp them for the 21st century. However I'm curious to see what other people think.
Comments (14)
Leading indicators are much better to see how a site's safety culture is performing. However, if you have effective leading indicators, I believe it has an impact on the lagging indicators.
I think they are dated, especially for small locations. One office injury could put you in a bad spot for the remainder of the year.
Leading indicators are the way to go for internal metrics; however, I think they are hard to normalize across organizations because - across the US - each organization is at their own place from a safety/analytics perspective.
What do you think OSHA should adopt to replace it?
My current company has a great DART, but poor culture - sometimes you're just lucky. The opposite situation probably happens a lot too.
Typically, our non-recordable injuries are worse than our recordable injuries. I've worked at places with zero recordables for years on end, but the safety culture was horrible. Employees were getting injured and not reporting.
I think these numbers offer some insight, but it shouldn't be the standard.
To me they are "indicators" that give you and indication of how you are doing, but they must be compared to others in your NACIS code! There are other things to measure how well you Safety Program is doing. Remember this is a Lagging Indicator, "the horse is out of the barn!" My last Corporate employer uses the OSHA Recordable Rate for your facility for every employee as a metric in our annual reviews, especially if you are ANY Salaried Exempt Manager! So you better believe I kept an eye in the Recordable Rate! In 43 years I never worked for a Corporate Employer where we used what we called a DART or TRIR, we just used the OSHA Recordable Rate as one metric and OSHA Lost Time as another. That is what OSHA uses so that is what we used. We also were always self-insured and got measured on Workers Compensation Costs per Labor Hour too. Never really heard of DART, TRIR , or Mod Rates until I started my own consulting business where I worked with mostly smaller companies with insurance companies. I learned of course in the Corporate World all the tricks you can pull with Stats, "tricks of the trade" if you will!