I know what you are thinking. You just had a safety audit, or you at least just had a meeting with your new safety officer and you have been going over your safety record over the past year or three, and you are flummoxed. You are going through your records, and while you are trying to make the safety work more efficient and find areas where limited resources could be better used – and yet you find nothing and you are ill-prepared for what happens next. So now, you can’t actually help your safety officer because you have been wrong before and being wrong again might just put you in even deeper financial trouble.
What seems to be the trouble? Bad recordkeeping? No – it’s the data and how they are used.
[Photo courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]While “lagging metrics” can be useful in determining where companies have gaps in their safety programs, they lack the ability to be good predictors for future trouble. Some new research is coming out to help companies develop leading indicators, designed to more effectively keep future workers safe on the job site.
In other words, you are not alone if you find that going back over your safety history and checking metrics actually does not predict future behavior or results. It turns out, the past does not predict the future when it comes to safety, so it makes it difficult to really focus resources on “problem areas,” since those problem areas can be different from one year to the next. So what ends up happening is companies may find themselves being forced to spread their limited resources across the entire safety program so as to not have any gaps – which could just be putting a band-aid on the wound instead of actually curing the problem.
How do I know you are not alone in this? Because I happen to know of a process and research taken on by the Campbell Institute, one of the foremost research entities for occupational health and safety. When the Campbell Institute is putting its resources into something, you know it’s serious.
The goal of the work the Campbell Institute is doing does not have to do so much with what are called “lagging metrics,” but it has to do with what are determined to be better predictive models for future safety issues – namely, “leading indicators.” We have all heard about them in other areas, and we have addressed them or have some education about what these are and their role in safety. The challenge for the Campbell Institute and its members was to look at developing a somewhat uniform matrix of leading indicators that could be applied across industries and departments.
The Campbell Institute is going through a research project with member organizations, academics and professional safety officers to look at leading indicators, their value to safety programs and how they can best be utilized to better ensure safety for all workers. I am writing this to you because the most recent report from the research project was recently released, and there finally may be some clarity for safety professionals and the C-suite for safety protocols and how to better prepare and focus resources where they need to be in the future, using leading indicators.
The first phase of the project involved getting general agreement among a range of professionals that the “lagging metrics” model does not work nearly as well as a predictive tool as the “leading indicators” model. What I will be doing here is writing a series of posts regarding the second phase of this research, of which the most recent report refers.This second phase involved getting professionals together to actually create solid, tangible leading indicators that companies, organizations, C-suite executives and safety officers could all use to find their potential issues and be able to better address them with the proper allotment of resources.
To be clear, this second phase doesn’t go into actual implementation; it just describes what these indicators are, their definitions, how to collect the data and analyze it and then how to best express the analysis to the different audiences so they make the biggest impact in fostering change where needed.
Future posts in this series will break down the research and describe the three different types of indicators, definitions of the indicators and how they are measured. You might want to get some popcorn and a comfortable seat, because this just might be a game-changer in your safety protocols.