The five levels
From most effective to least effective:
Elimination: remove the hazard entirely (the most effective control)
Substitution: replace the hazard with something less harmful
Engineering: change the work environment, system, or tool to reduce exposure
Administrative: policies, procedures, training, or scheduling changes
Personal: personal protective equipment or individual support
Higher levels protect more workers, more reliably. Elimination and Substitution remove or reduce the hazard at its source; Administrative and Personal controls rely on people behaving a certain way and so are the least dependable.
"Personal" vs "PPE": Risk assessments and tasks label the lowest level Personal. The dashboard's Control effectiveness pyramid labels the same level PPE; they mean the same thing.
Aim as high as you reasonably can: Regulators expect you to consider higher-priority controls before falling back to lower-priority ones. Recording the level makes it clear at a glance whether your controls are concentrated at the effective or the less-effective end.
How the hierarchy is recorded
Rather than living on a page of its own, the hierarchy is woven into the work:
In risk assessments: you set a Target Hierarchy level for each risk in the Set Up wizard, on the Scope and Schedule step, so the assessment records the level of control you are aiming to reach.
On tasks: a task can be tagged with the hierarchy level it belongs to, so the control work you do is classified as you go. See Managing tasks.
There is no standalone Hierarchy dashboard: The Hierarchy of Controls does not have its own route or page. You see it aggregated on the dashboard's Psychosocial tab, where the Control effectiveness sub-tab shows a "Hierarchy Of Controls Distribution" pyramid.
Where to see the roll-up
Open the dashboard and switch to the Psychosocial tab, then the Control effectiveness sub-tab. The hierarchy pyramid there shows how your controls are distributed across the five levels, so you can spot when too much of your protection depends on Administrative or PPE controls.