Why You Shouldn’t Rely on TRIR Alone
Once the gold standard of environment, health, and safety (EHS) metrics, the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) is now essentially meaningless—when considered alone, that is. The safety performance of an organization is far too complex to be condensed into a simple formula, and EHS managers must respect and appropriately respond to that complexity. While total recordable incident rate is often used to reflect a company’s past safety performance, it does not capture the full picture.
An excellent report on this topic, “The Statistical Invalidity of TRIR as a Measure of Safety Performance,” addressed the complexity of safety directly: “[S]afety is a chaotic system due to the interfaces between people, culture, policies, regulations, equipment and other external factors (e.g. economy, weather, natural events, etc.)”
The November 2020 report, released by the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) and authored by Dr. Matthew Hallowell, Mike Quashne, Dr. Rico Salas, Dr. Matt Jones, Brad MacLean, and Ellen Quinn, also revealed four key takeaways from a statistical analysis of 17 years of data and 3.2 trillion work hours:
- “There is no discernible association between TRIR and fatalities;
- The occurrence of recordable injuries is almost entirely random;
- TRIR is not precise and should not be communicated to multiple decimal points of precision; and
- In nearly every practical circumstance, it is statistically invalid to use TRIR to compare companies, business units, projects, or teams.” Although TRIR is intended to provide direct insight into safety outcomes, its statistical limitations undermine this purpose.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at total recordable incident rate, how it has become increasingly less valuable as a solitary metric, and what EHS managers should be doing to more accurately measure safety success.
What Is the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), and Why Is It Used?
Don’t get us wrong, while the total recordable incident rate should no longer be considered the end-all-be-all of safety measurement, the metric itself isn’t going anywhere. TRIR stands for Total Recordable Incident Rate and is a key metric for workplace safety, used to measure a company’s safety performance over a one-year period.
Among other reasons, your incident rate is a cornerstone of your annual OSHA reporting and is likely to remain a key part of this compliance obligation. OSHA requires private industry employers in certain industries, especially high risk industries like construction and manufacturing, to submit annual safety reports including corresponding data.
Essentially, two values are needed to compute this metric: the number of recordable incidents (including both injuries and illnesses) and the total number of hours worked. Here is the formula used to calculate TRIR:
TRIR = Total number of recordable incidents (injuries and illnesses) ÷ Total number of hours worked x 200,000
The calculation involves dividing the number of OSHA recordable incidents—which includes all work related injuries and illnesses requiring medical treatment beyond first aid, such as work related injuries resulting in days away from work, restricted work, or transfer to another job—by the total number of hours worked by all employees, then multiplying by 200,000.
This standardizes the result to the number of recordable incidents per 100 full-time employees over a one year period. The total number of hours worked should exclude non-working time such as vacations and sick leave; accurate reporting is essential for reliable data. You can check out more tips on discerning recordables from first aid in this article.
Calculate TRIR
For example, if your company had four recordable occupational safety incidents over the past year and a total of 200,000 hours worked, your TRIR calculation would be: 4 ÷ 200,000 x 200,000 = 4. Companies often compare their score to the industry average or average TRIR to benchmark their company’s safety performance.
The industry average TRIR can vary, but understanding how your company compares to others in high risk industries where recordable incidents are common is important for setting safety goals.
By incorporating this into the formula, it creates TRIRs that can be used to compare injury rates within any industry, whether a specific facility has 10 workers or 10,000. High risk industries pay particular attention to TRIR due to the elevated potential for workplace injuries and illnesses.
A company’s TRIR is an important metric tracked in safety reports and is influenced by the effectiveness of the company’s EHS programs. TRIR calculations and trir scores are used to identify trends, guide continuous safety improvement, and influence regulatory compliance, insurance premiums, and business opportunities.
So, while these data alone may not be very helpful for individual organizations looking to improve safety performance or limit recordable incidents, TRIRs can be illustrative for public health and safety agencies. The ability to quickly compare incident rates can help prompt the creation of new health and safety guidance and/or regulation as well as direct more effective or targeted enforcement efforts.
However, many organizations continue to over-rely on TRIR in important discussions of workplace safety.
Who Uses TRIR to Assess a Company’s Safety Performance, and Why Is This a Problem?
Perhaps because of its tenure as a prominent safety metric, TRIR continues to be a prime metric of performance for many organizations, and its influence can be seen from the jobsite all the way up through the C-suite’s board room. In fact, TRIR is one of the primary, if not the primary, safety metric considered by executives because it is the type of hard data that can easily inform decisions.
It can be clearly reported and used as a benchmark; it can be used to evaluate managers or potential contractors; it could affect insurance premiums; it’s a simple number to present to investors, customers, or others in the general public concerned about workplace safety.
A high TRIR or high TRIR score can be a potential barrier to attracting talent and securing business partnerships, as it may indicate safety concerns and a weak company’s safety culture.
When using TRIR to evaluate contractors, companies often require contractors to meet specific safety standards, including maintaining a good TRIR or low TRIR, to ensure alignment with the company’s safety expectations and reduce risk.
A lower TRIR score is generally viewed as a sign of good TRIR and strong company’s safety practices, while a high TRIR raises safety concerns and can negatively impact insurance premiums and reputation.
So, what’s the problem?
One problem with this is that the severity of incidents is not considered within the context of an organization’s TRIR. “[A] four-stich cut to the finger is counted in the same way as a fatality,” notes CSRA’s report, “and a near miss with the potential to be fatal is not in the TRIR metric at all.”
Another problem noted by the study is that it could potentially take many, many worker-hours of exposure before TRIR even becomes statistically meaningful. The short time frame that TRIR is typically reported (i.e., annually), combined with the hopefully infrequent and also quite likely random occurrence of a recordable injury, further makes TRIR an unstable—and therefore unreliable—statistic.
Additionally, relying solely on TRIR may not help prevent future incidents, as it does not address underlying safety issues or provide insight into proactive measures needed to improve overall safety performance.
And, finally, the simple fact remains that TRIR is a lagging indicator, and while these metrics aren’t necessarily “falling out of favor,” it is recognized now that lagging and leading indicators must both be considered as complementary parts of successful EHS metric analysis. Without additional data to support it, TRIR is useless.
TRIR Data Must Make Friends with Your Other Metrics
To make the metric meaningful, TRIR must live hand-in-hand with such common leading metrics as:
- Frequency and completion rates of employee health and safety training;
- Near-miss reports; and
- EHS audits.
A comprehensive safety program and robust safety programs are essential for reducing incident rates and fostering a strong safety culture. Integrating these leading metrics into your overall safety program helps drive improvements and employee engagement.
Other metrics that are more lagging in nature should also be used to support TRIR. For example, Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) rates can be used to close the previously-mentioned severity blind spots in traditional TRIRs, and comparing SIF to TRIR will provide a better indication of the severity of your recordable (and non-recordable) incidents. These approaches support continuous safety improvement and should be integrated into the overall safety program.
To navigate the complexities of EHS metrics, a parametric analysis approach is recommended. While that term may sound like it complicates things even further, it is a built-in part of Dakota Software’s Incident and Accident Management solutions, which are used to capture relevant safety data and provide exploration tools for qualitative analysis.
Through our parametric filtering, EHS managers can recognize trends and subtle correlations between data fields that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. Incident review processes and the ability to identify trends in TRIR data are crucial for preventing future incidents and strengthening the company’s safety culture.
To learn more about how ourEHS compliance software can help with this and other health and safety EHS initiatives contact us to schedule a demo.
