Dashboards are now a bit old hat: they were the flavour of the month a couple of years ago but their popularity seems to have declined. I tried to set up one for H&S at my last place (we saw the bandwagon and jumped on) but soon realised that it did not make much sense for our H&S. Dashboards work by giving you access to information on items that vary on a daily or even hourly basis- things like level of stock, number of customer enquiries etc but as far as H&S goes the numbers just aren’t there and the dashboard will only change slowly over the weeks unless you are doing one for a massive global business with 1000’s of employees where things can be changing ion a daily basis. At my employer, with only 600 employees the effort need to keep the dashboard upto date compared to what we got out of it was not worthwhile.

Something we use, is a factory floor plan, showing all the various departments and machines etc. With the department areas colour coded into the plan. Whenever we have an accident or near-miss report, we put a different coloured dot on the map, to show where the incident happened. We then change the colour depending upon status: reported, investigated, resolved, and contractor or staff etc. The dots always stay there (for a year or so) so that there is a history of where incidents are or have been. Each dot has an incident No. and at the side of the map there is a list of incidents so that people can see some basic details about the incident and its current status. This gives a nice visual representation of where incidents are happening and what is their status but also provides a useful motivation for area managers - especially when it becomes apparent that their area is showing more "dots" than any other! We have a master copy if this on an HSE Notice Board in one or two prominent positions at the site. Depending on what elvel of detail you want to report, it could be a bit of a chore to keep it up to date, but it works for us. We are in the process of also putting it online as a webpage. We like it anyway.