What we measure matters. And how we measure things, particularly in safety, affect the actions we take and our ability to reliably protect employees from harm. But metrics can also create blind spots when we fail to make the right distinctions.
Consider two events that both result in a broken wrist. In Incident A, an employee stumbles and falls while walking across the parking lot, fracturing his wrist in bracing for the impact. In Incident B, an employee reaches into an auger that moves unexpectedly, catching the employee’s hand, and fracturing her wrist.
In most organizations, these events would be counted as the same type of injury. But should they be? Consider that if Incident A were to happen 100 more times, it is very unlikely to result in an outcome much worse than a fractured wrist. But if Incident B were to happen 100 more times, there is a very good chance there would be loss of limb or life. In other words, even though the outcomes look identical, the potential is radically different.
It’s easy – and common – for organizations to drift into denial about the potential for injury, particularly serious injuries, that exist in the organization. Often, when a life-altering injury does occur, it is dismissed as “a fluke” that “could never happen again”. The reality is that despite the actual outcomes in a particular instance, some exposure situations have the potential to be very serious.
Among the biggest mistakes people make with respect to injury potential is assuming that their metrics (i.e. lagging indicators) show the total potential that exists in the organization. If we do not think about potential at the individual incident level we instead focus on aggregating and reporting the data that is available (outcome statistics). If the medical case rate or severity rate is trending downward, leadership can develop a false level of comfort that the chance of a life altering event, fatality, or catastrophic failure is also fading at an equal pace. This assumption is based on outdated paradigms that emanate from the accident pyramid or accident triangle. The common belief is that the pyramid is predictive. It holds that shrinking the base of minor injuries will produce proportional declines in fatalities and serious injuries. This is not the case.
Outcome metrics provide another path for leaders to fall into this mode of thinking. These metrics are attractive to leaders because they are easy to track, easy to calculate, and in many organizations must be reported to government or corporate groups. This focus on outcomes has even triggered some organizations to create several “sets of books” for tracking them. Creative classifications of outcomes prevail in these additional sets of books and further emphasize the importance that is attached to lagging indicators. Some of these classification systems can be quite elaborate, but all have a similar flaw in their focus on the outcome rather than illuminating potential.
Also problematic is the fact that some outcome metrics can be wholly misleading (e.g. severity rate). Severity rate is typically calculated by dividing the total number of lost or restricted workdays experienced by the total number of incidents experienced. If a leader doesn’t understand the variables within the calculation and the issues that come with them, unwarranted beliefs about the rate’s meaning can arise. In this instance, the following three questions must be answered when considering severity rate:
- How are fatalities factored into the rate? In some systems fatalities are excluded from the severity rate altogether. In other systems fatalities trigger a one-time charge of a fixed number of hours.
- How does an incident’s timing affect the Severity Rate? In many systems, severity rate is a “rolling rate” where a lost time injury that occurs January 1st may have a certain span of days from the previous year included in its calculation. In other systems the severity rate “resets” annually, so this same January 1st injury would produce a completely different severity rate and thus a different picture of what is occurring in the organization.
- How is the site’s case management capability factored into the rate? Depending on the site’s location (e.g. variability by state in the U.S.) and local bargaining agreements that are in place, there can be considerable variation in how the same injury is “managed” across different sites and organizations. For instance, some employees may be required to return to work on restricted duty whereas others may not be allowed to return to work until they are capable of fulfilling all their job duties. This is important as restricted time does not factor into most severity rate calculations.
Life-altering injuries are not inevitable. But organizations must develop sensitivity to their signals. Leaders who become good at seeing the potential for danger also make it possible to truly achieve world-class safety.
