According to Liberty Mutual’s 2021 Workplace Safety Index, it was estimated that employers paid more than $1 billion per week in direct workers’ compensation costs for disabling, non-fatal workplace injuries in 2018 (2021 workplace, 2021). Accordingly, organizations frequently engage in safety practices in the hopes of reducing these financial and human costs. The aim of this study was to examine whether performing safety observations reduced the likelihood of adverse outcomes. A safety observation refers to a checklist of behaviors deemed “safe” that should be conducted to help decrease or completely eliminate a safety incident. A safety incident is an event that causes an injury to an employee. We obtained three years of safety data, which included the observation counts and incident counts, from a large chemical manufacturing company in the United States. Safety observations were normalized by work hours to ultimately reflect the total number of observations per an 8-hour shift. Safety incidents were dichotomized to indicate: did an incident occur (1) or an incident did not occur (0). A rolling sum time-series logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze whether observations over the previous seven days decreased the odds of an incident occurring over the next seven days. The logistic regression analyses were performed within two different work units: Division 1 (chemical manufacturer) and Division 2 (maintenance). These divisions engage in disparate yet similarly risky types of work, allowing us to examine the generalizability of results across multiple work units. Our results indicated that observations reported today (day 0) reduce the probability of an incident occurring over the next three days across Division 1 and Division 2. Specifically, the odds of an incident occurring over the next three days was reduced by 0.23 (odds ratio) and 0.14 respectively, per each additional observation performed. This could prevent three incidents for Division 1 and could result in 16 fewer incidents for Division 2 over a year. These results suggest that using safety observations to mitigate incident risk is possible and highly advantageous. Performing safety observations while engaging in dangerous work can reduce injuries in the workplace, saving not only lives, but also time, energy, effort, and money. However, to make this a consistent practice requires a very proactive safety culture, accurate and consistent safety reporting, and support from upper management
