If you are new to this blog, first off where have you been? You’ve missed a lot, and I ask that you review some of the past posts to get up to speed. Second, if you are new here, welcome – better late than never, I guess. And that is especially true now, as I am in the middle of a multi-part series of posts dealing with leading indicators in workplace health and safety – those predictive models for determining the greatest future risks to worker health and safety in the workplace so safety officers and companies can implement their relatively limited resources in a focused way to minimize or prevent incidents and accidents that sap productivity and profitability.

[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]It is one thing to say safety is a priority, but operations-based leading indicators can determine whether it’s just a slogan. Making sure corrective actions are taken, or ensuring gaps are covered in the first place, can be revealed by these metrics.

The focus of this current series of posts is a research project conducted by The Campbell Institute, which recently released a report about the results of its research and collaboration. I introduced the project in this post, then discussed the methodology and the types of leading indicators that were brought forth, then I looked at some behavior-based leading indicatorsthat came out of the research.

Now that you are caught up, we can move on to another of the three types of leading indicators – operations-based indicators.

What are Operations-based Leading Indicators?

As mentioned in a previous post, when it comes to workplace safety and health, there are three types of leading indicators that go in step with those aspects of a worksite that are reviewed and evaluated for risks – worker behaviors and actions, the systems that are in place an being implemented (or not), and the operations of the work site to determine compliance with safety regulations. This post will talk about the operations of your work site, including how you run machinery and equipment, to meet safety and company regulations.

Operations-based leading indicators can be important because they can really help leadership understand the difference between having a program in place on paper and having it implemented and executed on the work site. This can essentially be a reflection of the culture of the company; if safety is truly a priority, then most of the metrics will be positive; if “safety is a priority” is just a mantra, the truth can be revealed here. Or, of course, it could be revealed by the turnover among staff. How’s that for a reality check?

Metrics for Operations-based Leading Indicators

In the case of leading indicators, what we should not be looking for so much are the specific findings of non-compliance on the work site, but rather tabulating and tracking the overall number of non-compliance issues in different departments or work sites. The goal here is to take a 30,000-foot view of your operations and notice trends of risk, rather than getting down into the weeds to address specific concerns. Operations-based leading indicators can be such things as:

  • Compliance: You know, it’s one thing to have standard operating procedure; it’s another to actually execute standard operating procedure. Some of the metrics to measure for adherence to SOP include the number of inspections that found no findings (which may not ignore fines) and the percentage of inspections that were “clean.”
  • Risk assessment: This is about being proactive; making sure steps are taken to ensure safety before work, and understanding the  tasks, risks and other hazards involved with doing a job. Some metrics to be measured here include scoring each step of a task for levels of difficulty, exposure and/or probability of harm; the number of the risks minimized or otherwise contained; and the number of assessments undertaken to evaluate severity of tasks.
  • Preventative and corrective actions: This involved measuring the steps taken to correct non-compliant behavior or seps taken to ensure that proper procedures are followed. Metrics for this include the number of days to close a corrective issue; the number of verifiable, effective corrective actions implemented; and the number and percentage of the issues that conform with the desired corrective steps.

Other items that can be checked under operations-based leading indicators are equipment and preventative maintenance of said equipment, training, management of the change process and what is called “prevention through design.” Do not worry; in a future post I will provide a list of the major indicators and metrics that came out of the research – we won’t leave you high and dry. But if you want a sneak peek, you can check out the Campbell Institute report linked above.