How Do You Stack Up Against the Competition?
As a business, we all want to know how our company compares to others within our industry. As a matter of fact, knowing where you stand in relation to your competition is just smart business. An easy way to assess your safety efforts compared to your competition is by figuring out your Incident Rate (IR).
What is an Incident Rate (IR)?
Every year the Department of Labor takes all of the injury and illness information filed with them and computes these numbers into a percentage rate that will tell you the average amount of injuries your industry experiences for every 100 FT employees. So whether you have 25 employees or 2500 employees, as long as you are within the same industry, you can compare how your safety record stands up to each other. In addition to comparing yourself to the big dogs, you can measure your own progress and make adjustments in-house.
How do you compute your incident rate?
It’s quite easy if you have data for the total amount of hours worked by all your employees for an entire year. If this exact number can not be obtained, at least get the number within the ballpark and you should be fine. You can estimate employees working an 8 hour day on a five day work week minus non-working days like personal days and holidays. Once you get this number, just fill in the IR equation.
After you compute your IR, go to either the National or State Incident Rates and look up your industry. Your exact business may not be categorized, but you should be able to generalize and find something close. For example, you may not find a listing for lava rock retaining wall contractor, but you will find a listing for Masonry, Stonework, Plastering.
By computing your IR, you will know how you stand up to the competition. How you use this assessment tool is up to you. If anything, you will know if you are ahead or behind of the competition in regards to injury and illness.
Talk to Your Agent
Talk to your insurance agent today to create a business insurance package that covers risks common in your industry and specific to your business needs.