Workplace safety is a topic worth discussing because companies are responsible for providing a safe and healthy work environment. First, however, we must prioritize the most critical topics showing where the company has the most significant impact.
It is essential to mention that this priority has to do with the severity of the impact, how recent it is, and how its mission, products, and services impact society and the environment. This last point means looking at their external impact first (workplace safety is an internal impact).
For this topic to be published, the following must be accomplished:
1. You need to show the company is in a "dangerous” industry (i.e., auto manufacturing, mining, oil extraction, food processing, etc.). This will determine if this is a relevant topic to be published.
This can be established in the introduction. Ideally, it would include information about the industry the company is operating in, such as:
- The number of deaths and injuries, if available.
- The types of incidents in the sector (to compensate for the possible lack of transparency by the company).
2. There must be enough data available (how many people were affected, number of incidences, severity, etc.). Make sure that these figures are significant. The injury rate (i.e., LTIFR and TRIFR ) is not enough to determine the impact as it does not help to show what is going on, such as the gravity of the injuries or illnesses. Compared to the industry average, these metrics can be mentioned to help show a comparison but should only be secondary to the analysis.
These metrics only give the reader an idea of the year-on-year changes and compare the industry average superficially, which can be considered remediation. Even as readers, we do not understand how the calculations are made, nor are they insightful as we do not know the nature of the employment, their contracts, etc.
The core analysis should include the following:
- The number of deaths and injuries in one year for the company being investigated. We measure absolute impact, and therefore, the analysis needs to use metrics available to disclose absolute values. In other words, 300 serious injuries will speak much more to our readers than a TRIR of 0.32.
- How many injuries per week in 1 year, i.e., calculation: if there are 52 weeks in a year and 25 incidents happened, then that means someone is injured every 2.08 weeks (52/25) or 0.48 injuries occurred every week (25/52). Or, if the company employs 2,282 people, and 25 incidents happened, then (25/2,282) 0.01 accidents happened that year for every employee.
- Establish whether the company has a poor track record to show the evolution and persistence
- Whether there are measures in place to ensure the health and safety of its employees.
- A competitor analysis shows how a similar company in the same industry performs and has a poor track record if need be. Here is the only time LTIR and TRIR can be used, as it should only be a measure of comparison to the industry it is in.
- Whenever possible, distinguish the data per job category (employees & contractors) to show, in certain cases, which group is most affected by poor safety outcomes.
Using TRIR and LTIR metrics to calculate the absolute injuries:
TRIR = (# of incidents x 200,000)/ # of hours worked. Where 200,000 is the hours of work, 100 employees would work. Therefore, to solve for the # number of incidents, the formula is = (TRIR x # hours worked in 1yr)/ 200,000.
If the company does not disclose the hours worked, we use OSHA's 200,000 hours for the calulation.
Example: Lundin Energy company (report p.35), the TRIR = 0.63, # hours worked= 1,584,509. Therefore, the # of incidents recorded by the company are: (0.63 x 1,584,509)/200,000 = 4.9
In most cases, the number of hours worked is disclosed.
If the number of hours worked is not disclosed, you can use a proxy by dividing the number of accidents by the total number of employees.
The only thing that this approximation does not capture is the fact that not all employees are full-time. However, we can assume that, on average, employees work at a 90% employment rate.
The analyses on accidents should first focus on the absolute number of accidents (and fatalities) over a few years rather than just one year as we measure absolute impact.
If you do not have the number of accidents, then you can use the employee count, assume the hours worked are 40 hours per week, and 50 weeks in a year (based on TRIR), then you can calculate a rough estimate of the absolute amount of accidents in a year.
Note: The TRIR should not be included in the title of the analysis as a central point, but it should be used to assess the company's safety record relative to peers of the same industry.
The TRIR and LTIR should not be used to calculate fatalities but can estimate the absolute amount of injuries.
Whenever you make your own calculations, please make it very clear in the analysis that this is an estimate and not facts.
3. Try to go beyond the company’s internal impact by looking at their supply chain, for example. This is in line with prioritizing external versus internal impact. Oftentimes this is where the most critical and significant outcomes/impact can be found.
4. You should make a critical assessment and not just report numbers found in the report without contextualizing them. Instead of focusing on year-on-year progress and reduction, it is best to focus on 2022 data (current impact), mention the types of injuries/deaths, analyse the health/psychological impact on employees, and compare the company’s data to the industry average. You can look at whether the company has a poor track record or has been sanctioned for overlooking workplace safety regulations, but you should focus on the current impact.
Ensure you add value to your readers and go beyond the company’s CSR report by not merely reporting data from the company’s report but going the extra mile of providing additional metrics, studies, and sources to make your analysis robust and the impact value and severity are clear.
We want to note that rating an impact note is as important as writing one. It is essential to the Impaakt platform that each rating is carefully considered within the particular topic to ensure that the company score is accurate.
Even if the company has reduced its fatality or injury rate, the ultimate impact remains negative.