How are health and safety measured in the workplace?
Health and safety in the workplace are an employee right, which companies have a duty to protect. In fact, good practices in terms of accident prevention are essential for the Elecnor Group. Thoroughness, soundness and reliability have been part of the group’s DNA since it was founded in 1958, through hard work characterised by the group’s commitment to reach the figure of zero accidents.
But how can we tell if all the effort that companies such as Elecnor make to safeguard the security of their workers has produced the hoped-for results? The simplest way is to use certain indicators that show the company’s situation qualitatively and quantitatively, in a standardised way, in order to produce benchmark results. Thus, two of the main metrics are the Frequency Rate and the Severity Rate.
Frequency Rate: The Frequency Rate represents the number of accidents in the workplace per million hours worked, without counting either in itinere accidents, that is, accidents occurring while commuting to or from the workplace, or non-traumatic pathologies.
FR = No. of computable accidents x 1,000,000/Hours worked
Severity Rate: As for the Severity Rate, this is an indicator that represents the severity of accidents, calculated by using the number of working days lost due to accidents per thousand hours worked.
SR = No. of days lost x 1,000/Hours worked
The data provided by these metrics show how last year in Spain Elecnor recorded the best results in accident rates in its entire history. A frequency rate of 3.4 compared to 3.5 in 2020, and a severity rate which has fallen to 0.15 compared to 0.16 the previous year, only go to show the effectiveness of all the work carried out by the Elecnor Group to avoid all kinds of accidents in the workplace, continuing a significant trend of improvement in 2022, with the frequency rate standing at 2.6 in July 2022.
The trend chart below shows the Frequency Rate (FR) in recent years in Spain, where the reduction in this rate over the last 10 years is very noticeable:
Furthermore, these metrics not only demonstrate how companies themselves are managed, but they can also be used to identify improvements, adapt goals and business strategies, or even raise awareness among those who make decisions about how positive and useful these projects are.
The Ministry of Labour and Social Economy provides more details on its webpage about the formulas for measuring accidents in the workplace, as well as a calculator to quantify them quickly. It can be accessed here: https://herramientasprl.insst.es/gestion