Podcast - Setting Safety Goals

[00:00:00] It is that time of year where a lot of companies, depending upon what your fiscal calendar looks like, a lot of companies are setting their safety goals for the year. And the way that goal setting has been done in safety is fundamentally flawed. It is actually setting you up for failure. So let's talk today about how safety goals should be set and what actions you should be taking to secure your position and demonstrate the value that you're providing to your organization.

[00:01:00] Hello? Hello, hello, my safety friends. Welcome to 2026. We made it. If you have been following me this year as I have restarted this podcast, then you know that 2025 was a dumpster fire for me. It was literally. Every single week, anything that could go wrong, went wrong. I'm talking health, personal family, all of it.

So I am so excited to be in 2026 right now, and I know that I probably should have released this episode a month ago, but I wanna talk about safety goals. And here's the thing about safety goals, is [00:02:00] that. They are set at different times of the year. So hopefully this episode finds you when you need it the most.

Because here's the thing, every company has different fiscal years, so basically every quarter could be the start of a new fiscal year, and that is when they are setting the company goals. And if you work for a company that has.

Even the inkling of support for safety, they will typically set safety goals as well.

So I know I'm a little late to the game in 2026 and getting this out, but it's definitely something that I wanted to chat about because if you were setting goals. Right now, you or your company, based on the number of people that are going to get hurt next year. We need to talk. So there is a fundamental problem when they come to you and [00:03:00] they say:

what are our claims costs gonna be for next year? Or How many fatalities are we gonna have next year? Or How many serious injuries are we gonna have next year? And these are questions your CFO will likely ask, and I've always looked at it as like. I am not a fortune teller. I can't predict the future. And if you look at even like weather, people, like I am obsessed with the weather app and I check it probably multiple times a day and they're experts in their field and they get it wrong almost every day.

But here they're expecting us to predict how many people are gonna get hurt. Next year. And that is just fundamentally wrong. So grab your cup of coffee and let's dive in to this [00:04:00] problem. So I have to caveat here because if you've been listening, you know, my mother passed away a couple of months ago and my sister has been.

Cleaning the house 'cause she lived with my sister, or my sister lived with her and my mom. I had a lot of stuff, so she has been slowly going through the house and she gave me two cases of coffee from Sam's Club, and it's not the coffee I normally drink. This stuff is so freaking strong that I have to basically make it into a latte.

But in my little OCPD mind, I'm just like, I can't throw it away. That would be a waste. So that's what I have in my cup today. I hope whatever is in your cup is a lot more enjoyable. All right, so let's dive into why I cannot stand the way that safety goals are [00:05:00] written. And there are two major problems when it comes to the way that safety goals are written.

For one, there's the moral issue, them actually asking. How many accidents are going to happen next year, and that can become very uncomfortable for us. So if your organization, depending upon the size, right? So let's say industry standard generally sits between four and five per 100 employees that get injured every year to over a portable level.

I'm not sure off the top of my head what the fatality rates are, but four or five people. Per 100 employees typically get a recordable accident. So when you are looking at your safety program and you know that you're just doing an average job, then you're basically gonna say it's okay for four or five people to get hurt.

Or if [00:06:00] you have 500 people, then you're saying,

that it's okay for 20 to 25 people to get hurt, and that is against everything we stand for, right? Because we are always striving to reduce incident. Even if you had a very low instant rate, let's say it was below one person per 100, you're still saying somebody's gonna get hurt. And that just makes it immoral to me.

But we can't say zero because you have to look at your past to predict your future. So, I mean, we do have to be realistic about it. It just hurts. There's like this ethical way about making that prediction. And somebody pointed out on LinkedIn, they pointed out about law of attraction. And I don't know if you believe in law of attraction.

I love the positive psychology. That law of Attraction is based on that. When you have positive psychology, there's. Actions and things that you do and the way [00:07:00] that you react to things that cause things to come your way. But if you believe in law of attraction, then you're basically saying. I'm bringing these accidents to me, I'm saying it's okay that these accidents happen.

So that's another way of looking at it, that, that was mind opening to me because if you want something good to come to you, law of attraction can help. But honestly, your mindset has such a huge impact on your results. If your mindset is that it's okay that 25 people get injured. And only 20 injuries come in.

Then you're like, oh yeah, that's all right. I'm not saying you would actually be in that attitude, but that is what is happening in our psychology behind that, why it makes it a problem. Now, the second problem with setting goals that are based on injury numbers [00:08:00] is the control problem. We've talked about this a lot, that you are not in the line of power and that your success is based on the results created by employees and typically frontline supervisors.

They create the results that determine your success, but you are not in their line of power. You are not anywhere in authority over those people. You don't have higher fire authority. So you're holding me accountable to accident injury numbers that I have very little control over. Now, the control that you do have is being able to learn how to influence people to make the right decision.

So yes, you can influence people and change their behaviors, but to hold me accountable directly for somebody [00:09:00] else's actions. Is not fair. I even think this way with sales, right? So if you are working in a sales position and you are not making the sales, which means you're not hitting your sales goals, you have very little control over whether or not somebody.

Buy something from you. You can influence their behavior. You can become really, really good salesperson to convince them to buy your thing. But to hold me like up or not, I get a raise or a bonus is based on whether or not that sale is made. I still don't think it's fair. I think that. We need to look at things that are 100% in that person's control.

And I actually worked for an [00:10:00] organization once that when I got up to the corporate level, my annual bonus was based on the sales team. I'm the safety person. I had zero interaction with the sales force. I had to work with my region. To get them to be building safe work practices and safe facilities, so that way hopefully sales could use that as a selling point to sell their thing.

And if they did and they made their sales goals, then I got my bonus. And luckily it got shifted. A couple of years after I started at the corporate office to include more things that are within my control ,

so that sales piece of it never went away, but it became a smaller piece of my bonus. [00:11:00] And that is the reality check because I do need to acknowledge like having those. Goals to shoot for the accident injury goals. The claims goals in that other case, the sales goals, you need to have those as a vision and as goals, but you just don't want it to be a big piece that's determining your performance reviews, your bonuses, your pay structure, and in worst case, whether or not you keep your job.

Because even though those things are out of our control, you need to use them to create actions that are within your control. So we need to have a vision for the outcome that we're wanting, but we just need to acknowledge that we have very little control of that outcome. And I'm currently [00:12:00] reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I read it every single January. I love the book Atomic Habits because it's such a great. Reminder of how habits are created. Like the first time you read it, it might be like a teaching thing for you and you're like, wow, I never knew that. And you learn something new. But I'm on my fifth reading now, so now it is just this great reminder of how habits are created.

And there's a story very early on in one of the chapters about a basketball coach, and what he said was, our goal is to win the championship. Like that's their goal. But what they focus on and what they judge their performance on are all the actions that they take. How many practices, how are they measuring their improvements?

How many drills are they doing things that are actions they can take that if they did them, it would likely lead to the championship. [00:13:00] So that's what you wanna think about with safety goals, is that we wanna have that outcome goal. We wanna have a zero incident rate or, maybe a 10% reduction, 20% reduction, whatever your company whatever your company.

It determines understanding that it could literally take one accident to blow out your claims because that's the other thing that they don't really talk about is let's say that every year your claims numbers are about a hundred thousand dollars worth of claims every year. It could just take one really bad accident that could make your claims dollars hit.

Multimillion or 10 plus million dollars in claims in one year. So that's another thing that makes it not a reality. So we wanna have that, but what we also wanna have are those action steps that we can [00:14:00] take. That are measurable, that are 100% within our control. And I do have a list of some of these for you, but it's definitely not all inclusive.

So things I want you to consider in your goals for the year is the number of training materials that you've created or delivered. The number of policies or SOPs or JHAs that you have updated or created the number of inspections done, or the percentage of corrective actions followed up on the number of supervisor coaching sessions completed.

Because you as a safety leader, need to be coaching the supervisors, not the employees. The number of management updates given, we in Safety Leadership Academy, we teach about the executive advisory committee, but you might just have a manager's meeting, so how many updates are you giving them?[00:15:00]

More than just a, this is what's going on in safety this week. The number of continuous improvement projects finished, and

all of these things are measurable. All of these things are controllable. And all of these things can easily be demonstrated to your teams that you did them, and you can show progress regardless of incidents because all of these things can help you track leading indicators so you can show the progress in the leading indicator that these actions impacted, so that way if that catastrophic accident happens.

They see it more as a one-off and not due to the lack of your effort, and this should apply when you're talking about goals. And action steps. This should [00:16:00] apply not just to safety managers or safety leads. It should apply to the supervisors and the company as a whole. I know some companies are shifting their goals and making sure that the supervisors or the management teams have safety goals as well, but it's same thing.

If that safety goal is a number of incidents, they do have more control over it because. They are the ones within the line of power, but one catastrophic event could throw everything off. So you need to also have what are the action steps that they're going to take that will likely lead to that outcome that they're wanting to get?

Now I know. That what I'm talking about here might be a pie in the sky dream for a lot of you, because I [00:17:00] know most of you are not being included, these discussions in goal setting and that some of you may even work for companies that don't even set safety goals. And that a lot of this is out of your control, that if you're working on a corporate level, a lot of this comes from the VPs and the C-suite on down, and you don't have very much control over it.

If you're working for an organization that you're fighting just to get them to do compliance, they're probably not even setting goals. However, there are steps that you can take. That may be you are getting the goal from your corporate office, or you're getting the goal from your executive team, or you're not getting goals at all, but you could set your own goals.

You can set your own action steps that you're going to take over the next year or 90 days [00:18:00] even. So the way that you would do this is you would start with acknowledging what their goal is, whatever it is. 10%, 20% reduction, $500,000 claim, cost, whatever it happens to be. And then I want you to ask yourself what would need to happen to make that a reality?

And you might need to look at your past documentation and data. This is why we build data-driven safety programs because the past will predict the future. So if you need to see a 20% reduction, you need to know where your accident and incidents are coming from. What are the behaviors that are causing them, and what leading indicators do I need to start impacting to give me that 20% reduction?

So you're gonna look at your past data, whether that be claims data assessment data, inspection data, observation data. Hopefully you've been collecting it. It'll make your job a lot easier, and you [00:19:00] determine what are those leading indicators that are causing the majority of the accidents because

pareto's principle, 80% of your accidents are likely being caused by 20% of your behaviors. So what are the 20% of those behaviors that we need to focus on? That's gonna give us that reduction for those 80% of the accidents to help you reach that 20% goal. And I did this. So when I first started as a regional safety manager, I had a region of 39 locations across the US

many of them did not have their own safety leads on site. I was their safety person, basically working with their management teams. I would say about half of them were like that. And the accident rate in this division was upwards of a 15 to 18 incident rate per [00:20:00] 100 employees injured, and my boss at the time said, you can't be successful.

It's too many locations for a high hazard. So I looked at all the data. I pulled every piece of data I could, and identified the 20% of behaviors that were causing 80% of the accidents, and that's what I focused on. I found the 20% of locations that were causing 80% of my incidents over my region. Yeah, that's who I went to visit more often and I developed systems to focus on those things.

And guess what? I got their incident rate down to like a seven or an eight the following year from a 15 or 16. It was crazy. Like my boss looked at me like, I don't even know how you did that. Like I set you up for failure. [00:21:00] So anyway, that is how you determine what actions you need to take, and you always wanna put it in a mindset of what is in your control, what can you control, and.

That is a lot of what we teach in our optimized systems is a great example of this is like what you can control is how many assessments you do on the department. What you can control is how you share those assessments, and then you're sharing them in a way that influences behavior, so that way they're changing their behavior.

That is how you can control it and how you can make that reduction more likely to happen. All righty, so this is where you're at. You've been given this goal. You don't have much control over it. You took a step back, you looked at your data, you identified actions that you can take that would make it likely for you to hit that [00:22:00] goal.

Your next step is to determine how you're gonna track your actions, your controllable actions, and you wanna track them so that way you can share them. Down the road, and you'll likely have dual metrics because you'll have the metrics that the company is wanting you to track.

Accidents, incidents, claims, numbers, right? And then you'll have your actions that you're tracking. And then whenever you're presenting how you're doing towards the goal, you always present both. You go, well, here are the actions I've been taking. Here is the outcome that I've been getting, and you wanna position it so that way you're wanting to show them your work to drive towards that goal.

So that way, even if external factors are impacting your final number and making it so you're not hitting your goal all along, they saw your effort and they will likely not hold that goal [00:23:00] to such a high standard. And you can frame this whole thing as like transparency and accountability.

Not that like you're avoiding responsibility for the ultimate goal. If you give me the goal of a 20% reduction, I could be like, I can't be responsible for that. I have no control over that. That is not gonna be as acceptable to your management team as okay. I'll measure that, but there's a lot of things that are outside of my control.

So this is the list of actions I'm gonna take that is gonna help me reach that goal. And this applies everywhere, not just in safety. I gave you the example of sales earlier, operational efficiency, quality, it's all the same thing. We all get these goals that are so much out of our control, but we really need to break it down into what is controllable.

And when you do this, when you. Have goals that are more actionable and within your control, and you're presenting it to your management team in this way, what ends up [00:24:00] happening is that your management sees the value that you're providing the organization. Beyond just injury numbers and you're never going to get that question of what do you actually do?

Or, I never see you doing any work. I get a lot of people that tell me that, that their management teams, question whether or not they're actually doing anything. So you're demonstrating that and then you're building like a sustainable system that come next year when they're setting goals, they will likely start making that shift.

One of the best goal settings I've ever seen, I can't remember what company it was, but they had this Hey, we want to see a TCIR of 1.25, but here are six actions. We're expecting every location to take.

And those were things that are checkable, right? So in my opinion, that is how goals should be written. And as your company is looking at setting safety goals, [00:25:00] maybe you can share this information with them, because like I said, it benefits not just safety, like every department should have goals like this.

Not just safety, but it's more important in safety because we are not in that line of power that we have so little control over the actions of the people, the results, that it's important that we have those. So look at your current goals. If I'm late to the game and you already got them, break them down into your action steps that you're gonna take and start communicating those action steps to your management team.

And you got this, my safety friend. I can't wait to hear about your results and see you crush your goals in 2026. I am super, super excited for this upcoming year. I think it is gonna be amazing. We're making a lot of changes here at the Safety Geek that I am excited about. [00:26:00] That you'll be seeing announcements for, you've already probably seen we're shifting from Safety Management Academy to Safety Leadership Academy and making some changes in that program and adding some community features.

We're now application only. We know who we can best help. So that's what we're focusing on. So 2026 is gonna be an amazing year, and it's gonna be an amazing year for you as well. So if you want some help reaching your career goals for 2026. If you want some help

with setting up your safety management systems in 2026. Then be sure to check out Safety Leadership Academy. Just go to the safety geek.com/apply. See if you fit into the category of people that we can help most, and I look forward to chatting with you. You guys have an amazing 2026 and I will talk to [00:27:00] you next week.

Bye for now.