Measuring Fire Safety Performance in the Workplace

Fire safety in the workplace is vital for keeping your staff safe and your company in line with the latest Health and Safety Executive (HSE) protocols. Making sure your fire safety is up to standard and doing its job requires performance checks that use pre-determined measurements to assess the effectiveness of your fire safety procedures.

In this article, we’re going to discuss the importance of implementing these predetermined measurements and discuss the steps that you can take to develop an effective fire safety performance measuring system.

The Purpose of Performance Measuring in Fire Safety

Performance standards are an excellent tool in terms of fire safety because it encourages the adoption of recognised practices. These standards not only ensure that the risk of fires in the workplace is mitigated, but they also give staff peace of mind that their workplace is safe and fully compliant with the law.

Being able to effectively measure how successful fire safety measures are is essential for effective fire safety management. If you are unable to measure the effectiveness of your fire safety, the framework in place is essentially moot because you don’t know how useful it will be in the event of an actual fire.

Effectively Developing Fire Safety Performance Measuring Systems

There are a number of factors to consider when developing a fire safety performance measuring system. Firstly, consider the frequency that you will be applying these measurements. If you have an older system in place, for example, you might want to increase the frequency to catch any issues as they develop.

It’s also important to consider the full picture when looking at performance measurements, as a sole indicator might offer misleading results. There is a balance, however, as too many indicators muddy the water and make it difficult to gauge the overall performance of the system.

A good way to approach fire safety performance measuring systems is to employ a balanced scorecard approach. This creates a good amount of data surrounding numerous fire safety activities that are tied to inputs, processes and outcomes. Factors to monitor might include:

• Customer complaints
• Effectiveness of controls such as general fire precautions or signage
• The response to an incident and competency of the workforce involved

There are other metrics to consider, such as benchmarking your performance against other organisations. It is key, however, to apply some form of performance measurements to your fire safety procedures.

Don’t delay, make sure your workplace fire safety is up to standard today.