If you are reading this, you have probably been anticipating this with great excitement – well, about as much excitement as one can muster about workplace health and safety issues, anyway.  In my last post, I introduced a report from the Campbell Institute regarding leading indicators in workplace safety. This post continues the series of very important posts that will break down the report by talking about the leading indicators that serve as the best predictive tools for risks in the workplace and can help organizations better allocated resources toward preventing workplace incidents and illnesses.

[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Safety officers often have limited resources to keep workers safe, and they need a way to find the risks and utilize resources most efficiently. The Campbell Institute released a report of a matrix of leading indicators, which can serve as an excellent predictive tool.

Why the need for this? Well, as I mentioned in the prior post, the “lagging metrics” model – where data is collected on incidents and risk factors in the past and are placed in a matrix for trend-spotting – has not been shown to be a very effective predictor of future risks. A consensus was reached  in the first phase of the Campbell Institute’s research project that “lagging metrics” should be eschewed in favor of what are called “leading indicators” – data that is gathered that can show increased risk and risk-mitigation opportunities in various organizations.

This is where the report comes in. The report reveals the results of the second phase of the research project, which covers the actual development of leading indicators that could be used across organizational departments, across industries and potentially across an entire economy. A panel of some of the smartest people around when it comes to workplace health and safety got together and came up with a matrix of leading indicators, their definitions and metrics to measure for each indicator.  I will not say whether I was involved in this research; many of you know me and I will let you decide if you think I’m smart enough to be included.

These 15 people came together and developed leading indicators that fit these basic criteria – they had to be proactive, predictive and preventative. In addition, these indicators had to be timely and actionable. Once these leading indicators were identified, they were placed into one of three types – System-based, operations-based, or behavior-based. I will not take a minute to define these so you can understand better the indicators themselves when we go over them in future posts:

  • Behavior-based leading indicators are those which  look at behaviors and/or actions of individual workers or workgroups at a work site. These can be applied at specific sites
  • Operations-based leading indicators are those which measure the operations of a work site, including any equipment that is used on the job.
  • Systems-based leading indicators are those that are within a safety program that is implemented either on a single work site or across an entire company.

In the next posts, I will dig a little deeper into these leading indicators, start defining them by their types and write about ways to communicate the information that is gathered from these indicators when you put them in place in your own business. We will first take a look at the behavior-based leading indicators when my next post comes out next week.