Health, safety and environment indicators and scorecards

While it has been accepted for many years that health, safety and environment (HSE) management is carried out by means of management systems, the question of how to measure performance and steer these systems remains a topical one.

Measures that enable the construction of HSE indicators are particularly important. Indicators provide feedback on the effectiveness of the management system and enable the various processes and activities to be steered. Traditional" HSE indicators are commonly and widely used by companies to assess their level of performance and steer their management system. However, these indicators have many limitations, which are intrinsic to the nature and typology of these indicators within management systems.

Generally expressed as a rate or index, these indicators have very little cognitive capacity. For most people involved in prevention, these indices and rates have little meaning and do not facilitate action or decision-making. They quantify frequencies of occurrence and levels of severity of undesirable events that have occurred. These indicators are therefore built at the "end of the chain" of a management system. They reflect the shortcomings and failures of the management system a posteriori. Traditional" indicators are therefore results indicators. These types of measures are therefore oriented towards the past, and do not allow for proactive management.

While "traditional" HSE indicators can be used to validate a management strategy over the long term, their use alone poses a number of problems when it comes to assessing the performance of management systems.

Faced with these limitations, the concept of the dashboard is an interesting one. The purpose of this concept is to better evaluate, control and improve an organization's performance level. It enables a number of relevant indicators to be summarized. Its purpose is to implement a global strategy across the various hierarchical levels of an organization, and to assess the level of performance achieved along several dimensions and precursor elements. This tool can be used to monitor the proper functioning of activities intrinsic to a system, and should also enable managers and decision-makers to anticipate the emergence of deviant situations. The use of this tool therefore seems particularly interesting in the context of a better assessment of the performance level of management systems and their piloting.

This article proposes a methodology for building a health, safety and environment dashboard model. The concepts of performance indicators and dashboards are first defined. An overall approach to building a dashboard model then presents the main stages in the creation and life of a dashboard. This methodology...