Leading Indicators: Key to a Strong Safety Program
With the increasing role of health and safety in workplaces, it is important that maintain focus on the prevention of workplace incidents. How organizations measure their health and safety performance can help continuously improve the process and stay on a proactive approach. Preventing injuries, or having the target of zero workplace injuries, is the ultimate goal of a health and safety professional.
The difficulty lies in how to best measure safety performance. An effective approach is to measure leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are measures that are proactive, preventative, and predictive. Lagging indicators are measures that track accident statistics.
For this post, we will be focusing on leading indicators, their benefits, and some examples of what indicators a company can measure. To ensure we do not leave out lagging indicators, our next post will focus on why lagging indicators provide a different insight into your safety program and their importance.
Leading indicators are critical to preventing injuries and incidents in the workplace and are a key factor in the success of a safety program. Companies that use leading indicators as part of their safety program demonstrate their commitment to workplace safety but also provides a direct benefit to reducing operating costs and improving efficiency.
When developing your leading indicators, you should follow the SMART principle. This stands for: Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Reasonable, and Timely.
Specific: Does the leading indicator provide information that will allow you to minimize risk?
Measurable: Is the leading indicator something that can be presented in numbers, percentage, or rate that can be tracked and evaluated over time?
Accountable: is the leading indicator relevant to your goal?
Reasonable: is it reasonable to achieve your goal set for the leading indicator?
Timely: are the leading indicators tracked often enough to identify trends from the data?
The age and size of your health and safety program will also affect the type of leading indicators that you choose. Companies with relatively new programs or less than 100 employees, that do not have much data to evaluate, will focus on leading indicators that can be useful early on. This can include; percent of staff with required safety training, percent of workers attending orientation, or number of workplace hazards identified on a weekly or monthly basis. These leading indicators can provide insight into the level of training and awareness staff have, while also giving useful data on frequency of hazards, or identifying common hazards.
Included below, is a table summarizing some examples of leading indicators that small and large organizations use to track the performance of their safety program. The indicators are not exclusive to business size and both small and large organizations can benefit from their use; however, some require more data to provide accurate trending information and insights into program effectiveness.
Examples of Leading Indicators
Percentage of staff with health and safety training
Percentage of workers attending orientation
Number of workplace hazards or near misses being identified monthly or weekly
Total number of training hours (can be separated into workers, management, and executives)
Number of safety innovations
Average percentage score on safety knowledge tests 3-4 months after training to identify effectiveness of training
Frequency of audits and number of audit action items, tracking overdue items, and speed of closing actions
Number of safety meetings (HSE committee, management review, and action planning)
Number of non-compliances (can be broken down into categories for large organizations)
Planned and carried out emergency exercises
Number of executive or upper management safety walks
These leading indicators are not inclusive but, when combined with targets or goals, allow you to track the improvement and progress of the health and safety program.
When choosing leading indicators, several factors must be evaluated to ensure effectiveness. For new health and safety programs, starting with two or three leading indicators will help reduce the dilution of data and helps increase the value of the data to your organization. Limiting the initial number of leading indicators can also improve the effectiveness of identifying which ones are providing the most benefit.
Make sure that the leading indicators you have chosen are directly tied to the outcomes that you want to achieve. For example, if you want to reduce the number of overexertion injuries at the workplace, use material handling equipment maintenance records, hazard observation reporting for oversized objects, and percentage attendance for lift safety training to measure the processes.
Factor in workplace experience, such as legislated training and continued learning. If the workplace is compliant to current legislation and you are looking to improve and go beyond what is expected, reviewing the training and continuous learning opportunities of staff can be a next step. As an example, for training in hand protection, providing more frequent refresher training or reviewing job hazard assessments with the workers can help promote safety and improve the experience and knowledge of the workers. This will exceed basic workplace orientation and can be tailored to specific tasks that may have a higher risk of hand injury.
Considering your audience is also important when choosing leading indicators. By involving all levels within your organization in the development of leading indicators, you are able to tailor an approach for each work group.
Lastly, it is key to understand the limitations of leading indicators. Understanding the logistics involved in collecting the information (time and cost) and attributing it to their relevance can help focus the collection of information to achieve your health and safety goal. Do not measure what is easy, measure what should be measured to improve performance.
Summary
It is essential to the health and well-being of workers and their employers to have a healthy and safe workplace. An ongoing effort to grow and sustain the health and safety performance is valuable to any organization, particularly if it can be specific and customized to suite your unique organization.
Leading indicators are an effective tool for organizations to track and improve the performance of their safety management system. It allows the organization to take proactive and preventive steps to prevent workplace incidents. As a health and safety professional, it is both my goal, and that of my employer, to provide a healthy and safe workplace for all workers so that we can move closer to the goal of zero workplace injuries and fatalities.
If you would like to find more information on leading indicators, I highly recommend you check out my references below.
References