It’s every safety leader’s nightmare scenario: a work site with a stellar safety record has an accident, or string of accidents, with no apparent warning. Further digging reveals persistent or recurring safety issues that were either ignored or never reported in the first place.
Clearly, the warning signs were there–they just weren’t detected or effectively captured. Preventing these surprises–and assuring true high safety performance – requires developing a sound set of metrics that tell you not just where you’ve been, but how safety initiatives and activities are performing right now. A good set of safety metrics should paint a three-dimensional picture of performance. We want to look for information on the nature and severity of exposures, on the contributing factors in systems and practices, and on the alignment of organizational goals with goals in safety. We look for patterns. Here are five key areas that form the foundation of a good metrics set :
- Exposure – Exposures are the gateway to injury and the place where any good set of leading indicators must start. By definition, exposures are any set of circumstances that present a risk of injury and occur in the configuration of people, process, and condition where work is done. While not every exposure causes an injury, each exposure event opens the door to an injury outcome. Simply, greater levels of exposure present higher probabilities of undesired events. A good measure of exposure would include not just a reliable sample of the level and type of exposures (including the severity potential they represent), but also include data on the conditions that create and sustain them.
- Safety and Health Programs – Taking one step back from exposure, we find safety and health programs. These programs are designed to deliver and assure alignment of people, process, and condition for safety. Typically, these programs fall into the several categories that cover both personal and process safety elements: Hazard Recognition & Mitigation, Skills, Knowledge, & Training, Policies & Standards, and Exposure Reduction Mechanisms. In order to support exposure reduction, you will need to evaluate whether your organization has implemented the necessary programs and whether these programs are having the desired result. One interesting and frustrating finding for many organizations is that sites with identical system configuration and independent audit scores often realize widely different outcomes. The answer to this problem leads us to our next metric.
- Safety Climate and Culture – Culture refers to the unwritten assumptions that influence decision making, attitudes and beliefs, and guides the behavior of those in the culture. Research identifies at least nine factors or organizational culture that independently correlate to safety performance. Interestingly, only a portion of these factors are specific to safety, and some of the most important to performance have to do with organizational life generally. Fully understanding culture takes an understanding of the structure, mechanisms and systemic consequences that drive behavior and performance.
- Organizational Systems and Consequences – The root cause of an incident may trace back years to a decision that was made at a very high level. What we determine about staffing levels, supervisory development, promotions, budgets or new projects all introduce changes into the systems that provide consequences for organizational behavior. To effectively manage safety, it is essential to understand the level of alignment between values, words, and systems. Fundamentally, it is helpful to assess: Selection and development for all levels; Organizational structure (staff level versus expectations, leader to worker ratio, etc.); Performance management (what is evaluated, the effectiveness of the process); Rewards and recognition (how are heroes created in the organization? What behaviors and practices are recognized or compensated?)
- Safety Leadership- Leaders make the decisions about the acceptable level of exposure, the safety climate and the type of culture that exists, and the systems to be implemented and that drive performance. In this case, it is helpful to narrow the focus to safety leadership. An assessment of safety leadership, specifically one that illustrates the connection between cultural scores and the level to which leaders use safety leadership best practices, is helpful in understanding the organizational patterns that sustain or reduce exposure to injury.
So what about lagging indicators? Lagging indicators do play a part and when statistically analyzed help us assess the effects of strategic safety activities. But it’s important to see lagging indicators for what they are: lagging. Doing everything possible to prevent injuries requires a broad set of metrics that provides insight into the systems, conditions and activities that create or reduce exposure. In other words, a better set of metrics.
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