How Not to Burn Your Budget in Vain... And What Else Is Benchmarking For?

Managing industrial safety in large companies increasingly hits the ceiling of internal analytics. Once baseline injury rates stabilize, OHS and industrial safety leaders find it difficult to assess the real return on implemented tools and defend budgets before shareholders. To make informed decisions and avoid wasting resources on formalistic procedures, an external frame of reference is needed—industry benchmarking adapted to Russian realities.

Safety Moment as a Snapshot of Culture and Risk Assessment

The discussion opened with a demonstration of a safety moment conducted by the meeting moderator, Vladimir Varlamov. A brief dialogue before a meeting serves as an indicator of an organization's cultural maturity: the relevance of the topic, practical takeaways, and the engagement of operations personnel immediately reveal the depth of safety work. As an example, they examined the issue of bears wandering onto haul roads and remote sites, which in practice translates into food waste disposal rules and equipping field vehicles with deterrents.

Dmitry Zubov, HSE Director at Cherkizovo Group, showed how such topics translate directly into occupational risk assessment. If an employee regularly walks to a remote water intake point on a riverbank, the threat of encountering a wild animal must be included in the operational risk register. This prompts the business to invest in remote telemetry and eliminate human presence in the hazard zone.

Limitations of Internal Statistics and the Cost of Wrong Decisions

Relying solely on in-house data often distorts the picture. Alexander Peresypkin, Deputy Director for Industrial Safety and OHS at Apatit, explained why a decrease in the overall LTIFR across a holding company can mask chronic injuries in individual business units. Directly transferring practices between branches does not always work due to differences in the labor market, regions, and technological processes. In external comparisons, what matters is not only the current performance of industry leaders, but also the trajectory of companies that have managed to rapidly reduce high injury rates.

Furthermore, within a closed loop, it is difficult to evaluate the return on time that line managers spend on behavioral safety audits and risk assessments. Without benchmarking against the market, it is unclear whether those hours deliver a measurable effect or have turned into a check-the-box exercise. Mikhail Zhiganov, Head of Safety Culture Development Directorate at Nornickel, noted that in occupational safety, an ineffective decision costs twice as much: resources are wasted and time for measures that actually work is lost. Before rolling out popular tools, a company needs to compare its level of safety culture against industry benchmarks.

Collecting such analytics manually requires immense effort. In Vladimir Varlamov's experience in the coal industry, preparing an accurate process-by-process benchmark took two and a half years. However, those exact figures helped align realistic targets with shareholders and, after bringing LTIFR below 1.0, transition to tracking minor injuries following the example of global leaders.

Protecting the Budget from Hype and Setting Up Internal Ratings

Market data changes the dialogue with operations personnel and top management. On the shop floor, external statistics help overcome occupational fatalism—where injuries are seen as an inevitable part of heavy labor—and the illusion of safety in areas where a zero-incident record rests solely on a specific supervisor's oversight.

At the board level, benchmarking protects the budget from overpriced IT solutions. The case of video analytics is telling: behind vendor presentations lie server shortages, staffing costs for model training, and disputes with contractors, causing the actual cost of industrial deployment to balloon from the stated 80 million to 500 million or even a billion rubles. An honest analysis of others' mistakes helps spot these risks at the outset. Within holding companies, external benchmarks also make it possible to build healthy competition. Alexey Portnov, Head of Division at Zarubezhneft, shared how an external benchmark helped create an internal rating of subsidiaries and contractors focused on the living and welfare conditions of rotational workers, creating a "neighbor effect" and stimulating the modernization of residential infrastructure.

Russian Specifics and the Mechanics of the HSE DAYS Platform

Foreign industry reports do not map well onto Russian practice due to legal overload and an alien context. They offer no answers to the current challenges faced by domestic enterprises: labor shortages, an aging workforce, the onboarding of foreign migrant workers, and supporting employees with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The HSE DAYS benchmarking tool, presented by the platform's Founder Andrey Prokopenko, solves the problem of data comparability through a system of thematic and industry rounds overseen by an Expert Council. This brings the calculation of LTIFR, fires, and incidents (both with and without contractors) to a common denominator, alongside headcount accounting for dedicated specialists who hold combined roles. Beyond baseline statistics, the framework includes leading indicators: the frequency of senior executives' safety dialogues with frontline workers, board members' participation in audits, and how safety performance is factored into career advancement. Production technologies remain protected as trade secrets, whereas sharing safety standards carries no competitive risk. Access to analytics is built on the principle of parity for verified participants, and the first round is dedicated to methods for assessing and developing safety culture.

What You Will Learn from This Session

• Why a decrease in a company's overall LTIFR can mask systemic problems in individual business units.
• How to determine whether the time and resources managers spend on behavioral safety audits and risk assessments deliver real value.
• What hidden costs arise when scaling video analytics across industrial operations and how to avoid multi-million-ruble overpayments.
• Where the line lies between trade secrets and the safe sharing of OHS and industrial safety practices.
• How thematic benchmarking rounds work on the HSE DAYS platform and which metrics are used to assess safety culture maturity.