Every maintenance leader is focused on keeping operations running smoothly. But there’s one goal that matters more than uptime, output, or efficiency: safety.
Keeping the team safe is priority number-one, but it’s also good for the business. Accidents, failed audits, and missed compliance can hurt morale, disrupt operations, and increase costs.
Although safety comes first, it’s commonly left out of reporting, which can leave maintenance teams blind to risks in their operation.
That’s why this article explores how industrial maintenance teams can measure, track, and report on safety, including:
- KPIs and metrics to track
- How to collect safety data
- How to build reports, get insights, and act on them
Six reports to help you track health, safety, and compliance
Before you can analyze and report on safety, you need a way to collect data. These six reports will help you gather the information you need to improve your health, safety, and compliance program.
1. Safety hazard analysis
What is it: A report that identifies, assesses, and establishes a plan to eliminate or manage potential safety hazards at your facility.
Where to find a template: The Manufacturers’ Health and Safety Association has several hazard assessment templates for maintenance teams. These templates help you collect information on:
- Asset and task
- Potential hazards
- Risk rating
- Corrective action and PPE needed
- Safety procedures for hazardous work
2. Recordable safety incident report
What is it: A report filed after a recordable safety incident, which is a work-related incident leading to:
- Injury or illness resulting in loss of consciousness, days away from work, restricted work, or job transfer.
- Injury or illness requiring medical treatment beyond first aid.
- A diagnosed case of cancer, chronic irreversible disease, fractured or cracked bones or teeth, and punctured eardrums.
- A fatality.
Where to find a template: OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) has a full set of requirements and a template for reporting on recordable incidents. The report includes:
- Personal details of the affected employee
- Date, time, location and description of the incident
- Type of injury or illness
- Medical treatment beyond first aid
- Days away from work or job restriction
- Cause and contributing factors
- Corrective actions taken or planned
3. Near miss report
What is it: A report that tracks unplanned events that could have caused injury or damage but didn’t.
Where to find a template: OSHA has a near miss template for industrial maintenance teams that summarizes the following details of an incident:
- Personal details of the affected employee
- Incident details, like date, time, and description
- Witness names
- Post-incident follow-up actions
- Recommendations on preventing similar incidents
4. Compliance audit and inspection report
What is it: A checklist to help maintenance and facility management teams prepare for audits. The specific requirements vary widely based on your industry, equipment, region, and regulatory requirements. However, having a standard report will help your team be proactive about compliance activities instead of scrambling to prepare for audits.
Where to find a template: The Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety has an example of a general inspection checklist for manufacturing facilities.
However, the best checklist is one developed for your specific needs. The template above covers requirements and inspections for:
- Training
- Work processes
- Fire emergency procedures
- Lighting
- Machine guards
- Electrical hazards
- Confined spaces
- Noise
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
5. Safety training and certification completion report
What is it: This report helps you identify which employees have completed trainings (both mandatory and optional), and which employees hold certifications.
Where to find a template: Below is a sample template for safety training and certification completion:
Report 6: Safety SOP attachment rate
What is it: This report helps you track how tasks, whether recurring, corrective, or reactive, with safety documentation attached. This allows you to monitor high-risk work and ensure workers are enabled with the information and resources they need to be safe and compliant.
Where to find a template: Below is an example of how to track safety SOP attachment rate:
Eight health, safety, and compliance KPIs to track for industrial maintenance teams
These eight KPIs will allow you to create comprehensive reports and dashboards on health, safety, and compliance. They’ll also keep your team safe and connect these efforts with business outcomes. Let’s take a look at how to track, use, improve, and report on each KPI.
Recordable Incident Rate
What does it measure: The number of OSHA-recordable incidents, which includes an incident causing:
- Medical treatment beyond first aid
- Restricted work
- Work days missed
- Loss of consciousness
- A significant injury or illness
How to measure it: OSHA recommends following this formula to measure the rate of recordable incidents:
Rate of Recordable Incidents = (Total Recordable Incidents × 200,000) / Total Hours Worked
This equation allows you to normalize the number of recordable incidents per 100 employees.
How to use it: Spot recurring safety issues by asset, task, or hazard so you can understand and solve the root cause. For example, if you see that tasks completed in confined spaces lead to more recordable incidents, you can run a root cause analysis and reduce risk in this area.
How to improve it: Some measures you can take to reduce total recordable incidents include:
- Making pre-task safety checklists mandatory
- Attaching safety instructions and PPE requirements to all work orders
- Conducting job hazard analyses on high-risk tasks
- Redesigning tasks or workflows
- Flagging high-risk assets for replacement or major repair
- Conducting extra training
How to report on it: Create a monthly report for:
- Incidents by site, department, type, and time/shift
- Visual data, like a 12-month trendline and heatmaps to show incident density by site or asset
- Additional context, like completed corrective actions and incident trends linked to training or checklist compliance
Near Misses
How to measure it: The near misses KPI is often tracked per 100 employees or 10,000 working hours. This equation looks like this:
Near Miss Rate per 100 Employees = (Total Near Misses ÷ Total Employees) × 100
Near Miss Rate = (7 ÷ 210) × 100
Near Miss Rate = 3.33
How to use it: Near miss reports help you find and fix negative safety trends and gauge safety awareness at your facility. Generally, a high near miss rate early in your safety program can be positive as incidents that would otherwise go unreported and unaddressed come to light.
How to improve it: There are a few key actions you can take to improve your near miss rate, like:
- Making it easier to report a near miss
- Identifying patterns or hotspots before actual incidents
- Prioritizing and tracking corrective actions to prevent recurrences and serious incidents
- Improving training, safety procedures, and accessibility of safety documentation or PPE
- Adding near miss updates to regular team meetings
How to report on it: Create a monthly report that tracks:
- Total near misses
- Near misses by site, asset, or task
- Year-over-year trend lines
- Top-three risks identified through near misses
- Corrective actions completed
Safety Training Completion Rate
How to measure it: Calculate the percentage of training hours completed by employees with this equation:
Safety Training Completion Rate = (Number of completed required training hours ÷ Total assigned training hours) × 100
Safety Training Completion Rate = (80 ÷ 88) × 100
Safety Training Completion Rate = 90.9%
You can also break this down by individual, department, site, or training type
How to use it: Keeping an eye on your safety training completion rate helps you:
- Identify compliance gaps and avoid regulatory exposure.
- Ensure high-risk tasks are only performed by trained staff.
- Track onboarding effectiveness and refresh cycles for recurring topics.
- Compare training completion with incident rates to validate program impact.
- Find areas you can increase training to increase task coverage and team efficiency.
How to improve it: Increasing your safety training completion percentage can be done by:
- Assigning due dates and sending automated reminders.
- Integrating training with onboarding and refresher schedules.
- Integrating training into work flows, like creating high-priority work orders for training.
- Tying completion to access permissions, career advancement, and bonuses
How to report on it: Build a report that includes the following:
- Overall completion rate
- Completion by site, role, or topic
- Increase in team coverage and/or efficiency from increased training or certification
Safety SOP and checklist attachment rate
How to measure it: Find the number of recurring tasks and known corrective work that requires safety information. This includes safety SOPs and procedures as part of a full checklist. Here’s how you calculate that:
Safety SOP and checklist attachment rate = (Number of work orders with safety documentation ÷ Total applicable work orders) × 100
Attachment rate = (53 ÷ 85) × 100
Attachment rate = 62%
How to use it: Use safety SOP and checklist attachment rate to:
- Evaluate and improve both internal and third-party procedural compliance.
- Benchmark sites and standardize safety protocols across facilities.
- Spot gaps in SOP availability or checklist usage for common tasks.
- Prove diligence during audits or incident reviews.
How to improve it:
- Audit repeating work orders, emergency procedures, and inspection tasks to find work without safety documentation.
- Attach existing safety documentation to work that’s missing it.
- Where safety documentation doesn’t exist, create it and attach to relevant tasks.
- Standardize safety information by maintenance type or asset. Create an automated workflow that attaches this documentation when new tasks are created.
- Create a mandatory work sign-offs to verify safety materials are attached
How to report on it: Build a report that tracks:
- Percentage of work orders with safety attachments
- Progress to full coverage (monthly or weekly, by site or work type)
- Critical gaps (ie. 20% of electrical work orders are missing a LOTO checklist)
- Pair with incident rates to show correlation between preparation and outcomes
Inspection Compliance Rate
How to measure it: The first way to measure inspection compliance rate is the percentage of safety and compliance inspections completed by your team vs. planned. Here’s how to calculate this:
Inspection Compliance Rate = (Number of Inspections Completed ÷ Number of Inspections Planned) x 100
Inspection Compliance Rate = (38 ÷ 40) x 100
Inspection Compliance Rate = 95%
The second way to calculate this KPI is to measure the success of an audit by a third-party, like a customer or regulatory agency. This tracks the percentage of inspection elements that received a pass using this formula:
Inspection Compliance Rate = (Number of Elements Passed ÷ Number of Elements) x 100
Inspection Compliance Rate = (77 ÷ 80) x 100
Inspection Compliance Rate = 96%
How to use it: Here are the actions you can take using your inspection compliance rate:
- Track compliance success and compliance readiness.
- Assess regulatory compliance and risk exposure.
- Identify recurring missed inspections (by team, asset, or time period).
- Justify investments in staffing or automation if compliance drops.
- Demonstrate due diligence to auditors, customers, or insurers.
How to improve it: If compliance rates are low or dropping, take these measures:
- Automate inspection reminders and scheduling through a CMMS
- Assign clear ownership and accountability for each inspection.
- Build visual inspection dashboards for team leads and managers.
- Identify and eliminate bottlenecks (e.g., parts delays, lack of trained personnel).
How to report on it: Build a monthly or quarterly dashboard to with:
- Overall compliance rate
- Compliance rates by site, team, or asset type
- Missed or overdue inspections
- Heatmaps or bar graphs for high-risk areas
- Charts that show trendlines, like improvement or decline in compliance rates
Corrective Action Closure Rate
How to measure it: This KPI helps you track how well you address safety and compliance issues identified by internal inspections and third-party audits. Here’s how to find your corrective action closure rate:
Corrective Action Closure Rate = (Corrective actions closed within set period ÷ Corrective actions issued during set period) × 100
Closure Rate = (15 ÷ 18) × 100
Closure Rate = 83%
How to use it: Tracking your corrective action closure rate helps you:
- Prove compliance to auditors, regulatory agencies, customers, and others.
- Identify gaps and risks, and address them to improve safety and compliance.
- Plan better for future audits and compliance checks.
- Adjust training plans, budgets, SOPs, and other strategic areas of your program.
- Illustrate the need for more resources to improve preventive maintenance.
How to improve it: Improving your corrective action closure rate is about keeping tasks prioritized and visible to the team. You can do this by:
- Assigning clear ownership and deadlines for each corrective action.
- Setting priority levels by severity or risk.
- Integrating corrective actions into CMMS workflows or daily task boards.
- Conducting regular review meetings to track progress and remove blockers.
How to report on it: Create a report that tracks:
- Closure rates (total, by site, by priority, etc.) and trends
- Closed and open tasks
- Average closure time and average cost of corrective work (including downtime)
- Overdue actions
Time spent on compliance audits
How to measure it: Knowing the time you spend on audits allows you to find efficiencies in your team’s schedule without sacrificing safety. When calculating this KPI, take into account time spent preparing for, conducting, and responding to audits or inspection tasks.
How to use it: This report is about finding efficiencies in your audit processes. The first priority is safety and compliance, but you can reduce the impact of work on costs and production by looking at:
- Which tasks take the most time to complete.
- Which tasks lead to corrective actions and increase time spent on compliance.
- How compliance activities impact downtime, asset availability, and costs.
- Ways to streamline audit preparation and compliance inspection processes.
- Opportunities to invest in automation to accelerate tasks.
How to improve it: Cutting the time your team spends on audits (while staying safe), has a lot of similarities to making other maintenance work more efficient. That includes:
- Digitizing documentation, SOPs, and inspection records to reduce prep time.
- Creating standard audit prep checklists and templates.
- Assigning audit coordinators or champions at each site.
- Finding bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the processes, then addressing them.
- Embedding compliance readiness into daily routines rather than one-time scrambles.
How to report on it: Create a report that tracks the following metrics:
- Total hours spent on audits (and total hours per audit type and stage)
- A breakdown by site or team
- Total cost of audits (and by cost type, tasks, audit stage, etc.)
- Year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter comparisons
Safety-related Downtime Hours
How to measure it: Calculate this KPI based on the total equipment downtime caused by safety incidents, hazards, or investigations. Include time lost due to:
- Injuries requiring machine shutdown
- Safety inspections or investigations after an incident
- Delays caused by missing PPE, permits, or unaddressed hazards
- Compliance-related stop-work orders
For example, if a production line was shut down for six hours after a technician injury, those six hours count toward this KPI.
How to use it: Tracking safety-related downtime hours has a double impact—you improve the safety of your team while keeping machines running. Here’s what to look for in your data:
- The operational impact of safety failures on productivity and costs.
- Repeat offenders (assets, tasks, or sites causing recurring downtime).
- Opportunities to get buy-in for extra resources, like training.
- Processes that need to be updated or revised to improve safety.
- Where extra preventive maintenance tasks are required.
How to improve it: There are five key steps you can take to reduce safety-related downtime:
- Proactively address root causes from past downtime events.
- Use near miss reports and leading indicators to prevent shutdowns before they happen.
- Improve readiness with clear LOTO procedures, pre-work checklists, and permit systems.
- Conduct mock drills or simulations to reduce investigation and response time.
- Train frontline staff on rapid hazard identification and reporting protocols.
How to report on it: Design a dashboard that tells you:
- Total hours lost to safety-related causes (plus, by cause, asset, site, etc.)
- Percentage of overall downtime that’s safety-related
- Hours lost over time (by month and quarter)
- The cost of safety-related downtime (plus, by cause, asset, site, and over time)
How maintenance leaders can create a health, safety, and compliance dashboard to measure business impact
While safety should be a regular part of maintenance operations, having a separate dashboard for it allows you to highlight team wins, positive trends, and its financial impact.
The KPIs on your dashboard depend on what is relevant to your facility and company. The template below will help you
- Set goals for these metrics and track progress toward these goals
- Spot positive trends or at-risk areas
- Compare and segment metrics by time period, task, site, etc.
- Calculate the business impact of your KPIs
Here’s a template maintenance leaders can use to measure health, safety, and compliance:
Here’s an example of what it looks like in action:
The next step is to present these numbers with context, analysis, and a strategy. Here’s a framework that will help you organize your thoughts and tell the right story:
Here’s an example of how you might fill out this template using the sample dashboard above:
Measuring safety is a must-have daily habit of maintenance teams
Safety isn’t just something to talk about at the start of a shift. It’s something to measure, manage, and improve like any other business-critical function.
By building structured reports, tracking the right KPIs, and presenting insights as a narrative, you’re protecting your team as well as the company’s uptime, reputation, and bottom line.
Whether you’re just getting started or refining an existing program, the tools in this guide can help you create a reporting system that earns trust from the shop floor to the boardroom.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the difference between a safety report and a safety KPI?
A report documents incidents or compliance activities (like a near miss or audit checklist). A KPI is a measurable performance metric (like TRIR or inspection compliance rate) used to track trends and progress over time.
How often should maintenance teams report on safety and compliance metrics?
Most maintenance teams report monthly for internal operations and quarterly for executive-level reviews. High-risk areas may require weekly monitoring. Compliance reporting also depends on how often third-party audits are completed. Corrective action often has to be completed in a specified window that varies between third-parties and audits.
What tools do I need to track these metrics?
A CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) can help automate reporting. Spreadsheets work for smaller teams, but dashboards and audit logs become essential as complexity grows.
What’s a good first step in safety reporting if we’re starting from scratch?
Start by tracking total recordable incidents, near misses, and training completion. These provide a solid foundation for safety awareness, compliance, and risk mitigation.
How do I get buy-in from leadership to invest in safety reporting?
Use data to show the financial impact of safety failures (like downtime or insurance costs), and tie KPIs to broader business outcomes like productivity, compliance, and culture.
Marc Cousineau is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at MaintainX. Marc has over a decade of experience telling stories for technology brands, including more than five years writing about the maintenance and asset management industry.