Well, it has certainly been a fun adventure unveiling some of the details of The Campbell Institute’s report on research into leading indicators of workplace health and safety, no?
Well, we are almost to the end of this adventure. As we have spent a little time going over the research project and report that discussing some possible leading indicators of future risk to workplace health and safety and how to compile the metrics, we have also delved deeper into two of the three types of leading indicators – behavior-based LIs, which measure the overall behavior and action patterns of workers on the job site; and operations-based LIs which look at the operations of the work site in terms of company policies and adherence to safety regulations and risk management with different tasks.
[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]For all intents and purposes, a health and safety program is the heart and soul of any workplace’s commitment to safety and productivity of the workforce. And assessing the effectiveness of that program is as vital as any other aspect of your safety culture, so it’s important to know where there are gaps in your program so they can be addressed before a major incident occurs.
What are Systems-based Leading Indicators?
As was discussed in prior posts, much of the workplace safety issues and programs are based around three aspects – worker behavior and actions on the work stie, the operation of machinery, equipment and compliance with company protocols, and the health-and-safety system or program itself. Finding the gaps or the high-risk opportunities in your workplace can be important when you have relatively limited resources for promotion of a safe working environment. Knowing where to focus much of those resources for maximum impact can be vital to overall productivity and profitability.
Here, we are talking about systems-based leading indicators, which are those that come from an evaluation of the health-and-safety system or program that is in place in the workplace. Like other leading indicators, this is not about looking at specific events or activities within the system; this is a bird’s-eye view of the entire system and recording information that may show a trend of risk or hazard – such as the use of safety equipment, conformity with existing safety protocols and the failsafes that are behind them if there is a breach, etc. A lot of information can be revealed about whether your program is rock-solid, porous like cheesecloth or somewhere in between.
Systems-based Leading Indicators and Metrics
The blue-ribbon panel of 15 professionals worked with The Campbell Institute to come up with a matrix of leading indicators and grouped into three types. These systems-based indicators were determined by the panel to be key signs of predicting future risk and hazard issues within a health and safety system in the workplace. Examples of these leading indicators and their corresponding metrics follow:
- Hazard identification and recognition: This is outside of audits – both management and employe observations of hazards and risks and evaluating and communicating those potential problems. Metrics under this category that can be measured include the number of near-miss incidents; the number of unsafe observations, as well as safe ones; the number of unsafe observations per employee on shift during a certain time period or shift; and the ratio of safe to unsafe observations.
- Leading indicator component evaluation: This sounds like making a leading indicator a category of leading indicator. But actually this refers to analyzing “lagging metrics” – past performance – to find correlations and trends that may predict future risks or hazards. Metrics for this include annual and year-over-year analyses of correlation rates; the number of and percent of predictive metrics that meet or exceed predictive goals; and the number and percetn of predictive metrics that meet or exceed actual outcomes.
- Learning system: This gets into the training program itself. This indicator looks into the on-the-job training, videos or other instructional tools as well as the overall implementation of health and safety knowledge and skills as well as the ability to learn from past incidents. Measures in this category include the amount of money spent on training; the number of training hours – either per employee, per site or per time frame; and the number and percent of positive (and negative) post-training evaluations.
These are just three examples of a pretty comprehensive list of indicators. Others include a permit-to-work system; a safety perception survey; the communication of safety; the system of discipline, recognizing and reinforcing safety protocols; hazard analysis; health and safety component system; risk assessment; and, of course, preventive and corrective actions.
Again, as was mentioned before, these lists are not meant to say that your company or organization should have all of these indicators. Not every one of these will work or behave much predictive value for your particular organization, but this is rather to give you a sense of the kinds of indicators that can be measured and it would be up to each organization to determine the indicators that might have the most value – preferably at least one of each type discussed – behavior-based, operations-based and systems-based.
OK, yes, this series does have an ending. Finally, we get to the meat and potatoes – my next post will go into some of the leading indicators that were released as part of The Campbell Institute report. So hopefully this will mean you will all get an idea of how to approach your company health and safety program with these leading indicators.