Safety - Moving from Lagging to Leading Indicators

Many organizations have historically used lagging safety indicators as a basis to measure and improve safety performance.  Some of these organizations also use such lagging indicators for the safety component of incentive pay.  Lagging indicators typically used include OSHA recordable, lost time and severity rates, and may also include first-aid-only incidents. 

While it’s clearly important to track recordable injuries, conduct incident investigations and implement corrective and preventive actions, the use of leading indicators provides many more learning opportunities for improvement.  Accidents rarely have a single cause, but instead result from multiple simultaneous and/or sequential failures.  Incorporating thoughtful leading indicators into an organization’s safety program can improve performance by identifying the latent failures, and correcting the underlying conditions before an accident occurs.   Common leading indicators include near miss events, unsafe condition and unsafe behaviors.  Additional leading indicators to consider include on-time completion of required training, timely completion of safety inspections, completion of emergency response drills, accuracy of operating procedures, safe behavior observations, fatigue risk management, and spot checks of employees and contractors to determine the percentage who understand the hazards of their work and/or the site itself. 

Learning objectives of the presentation include understanding of leading and lagging safety indicators, selection and use of appropriate leading and lagging safety metrics, overcoming management resistance to the use of leading indicators for incentive pay, and lessons learned from an organization that transitioned from lagging to leading safety indicators.