How the WorkSafeBC Safety Planning Toolkit Can Transform Your Health and Safety Program
When the WorkSafeBC Employer Health and Safety Planning Tool Kit first came out in 2018, I started using it right away, and I’ve never stopped. To this day, I refer to it several times a year when I’m reviewing strategy, performance, or benchmarking a company’s health and safety program. Frankly, I think it’s one of the most underused resources out there.
What the Toolkit Is
The Employer Health and Safety Planning Tool Kit is an online interactive system that gives you a deep look into your company’s injury performance and how it stacks up against others in your industry. It’s available through your firm’s WorkSafeBC online services under the “Claims” section.
The toolkit does a few critical things:
Shows how your injury costs affect your insurance rates
Compares your performance to industry peers
Highlights your most frequent and most costly injuries
Identifies your most cited regulatory orders
Tracks your return-to-work results
Forecasts the potential savings if you reduce injuries or improve claim management
In short, it turns your company’s data into a roadmap for improvement. You can analyze trends, see which injuries are driving your costs, and even forecast how much money you could save by reducing certain types of incidents.
Why It Matters
Most organizations collect plenty of health and safety data, but few use it effectively. This toolkit connects the dots between what’s happening in your workplace and how that affects your financial and operational performance.
I often hear employers say, “We already track our incidents internally.” That’s great, but it’s not the full picture. WorkSafeBC’s database allows you to see how your business compares to hundreds of others in your industry, giving context that you simply can’t get from internal metrics alone. It also helps identify blind spots, like risks that are trending across your sector that may not have hit your own sites yet.
How I Use It
Whenever I start consulting with a new client, the first thing I ask for is their Employer Health and Safety Planning Tool Kit report. You’d be surprised how many people have never even heard of it. Once they see what’s inside, injury trends, claim durations, inspection history, peer comparisons, it’s like turning on the lights.
I use it to:
Compare a company’s performance to others in their classification unit
See where their high-duration claims are coming from
Identify top injury types or departments driving costs
Review inspection and regulatory trends
Benchmark return-to-work success against industry norms
It’s also a great way to validate whether your own safety data aligns with WorkSafeBC’s records. Sometimes the two tell different stories, and reconciling that difference can reveal reporting gaps or process issues that need fixing. You can find more informaiton on the employer health and safety planning tool kit here:
The Business Case for Using It
The toolkit isn’t just about compliance, it’s about money. The Experience Rating Forecaster tool within the kit lets you model how reducing claims could lower your insurance premiums. You can literally see the financial return on investment of improving safety.
For example, reducing your top injury type by even 20–30% could save thousands in premiums and downtime. That’s the kind of information that gets management’s attention and helps justify new initiatives, training programs, or equipment upgrades.
Final Thoughts
The WorkSafeBC Employer Health and Safety Planning Tool Kit takes the guesswork out of safety planning. Whether you’re running a manufacturing plant, a construction company, or a small retail operation, it gives you hard data to make smart decisions.
If you haven’t logged in to use it yet, you’re missing out on one of the best (and free) tools available to BC employers. And if you’re not sure where to start, I can help you pull your report and walk through the results. Click on the button below.
