This is like the Mt. Everest of blog-post series, isn’t it?

Would you believe, Mt. Kilimanjaro?

[Image courtesy of The Natural Step Canada from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Now that we are listing the leading indicators for your safety program, you might not have to see this photo again for a while.

I wish I could give you a “I survived Barb’s blog post series about leading indicators and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” T-shirt, but alas, I can’t even do that for you.  I can give you accolades and gratitude to all of you for sticking this through and being patient with me as I dissected this fascinating report submitted by The Campbell Institute regarding its research into finding effective leading indicators that serve as predictive tools for risk assessment and management in the workplace.

At last, after covering the three types of leading indicators, we have come to the end of the research report – which displays several pages of what it calls the “full matrix” of leading indicators that businesses and organizations can use in their workplaces to determine future risks and hazards in workplaces so corrective and preventive action can be taken. The last several pages of the report lists the nearly 20 leading indicators that came out of the research culled from a workshop featured 15 top workplace health and safety professionals. These leading indicators were placed into one of three types – behavior-based, operations-based and systems-based – and then later ranked by the workshop group. As was stated before, in no way are you encouraged to use all of these indicators and correlated metrics in your organization, because some of these will not fit your particular situation. Ideally, though, if some research can help you find at least one leading indicator of each type, that may certainly go a long way toward helping you allocate and focus your safety resources in the area where it is needed most – to fill in gaps or to mitigate  future risks or hazards.

I will not go into detail here, but I will introduce you to the leading indicators determined by The Campbell Institute research report, and if you would like to know more about any of these, you can check out the back pages of the report, where it goes into greater details about the indicators and appropriate metrics that can be used for each indicator.

Leading Indicators

  • Risk assessment (Operations, Systems) – Proactive evaluation of risks and hazards and preventive steps
  • Hazard identification and recognition (S) – Evaluation via employee and management observations to determine hazards and risks
  • Risk profiling (S) – Evaluating the risks and hazards, prioritizing for correctives and finding areas to improve
  • Preventive and corrective actions (O, S) – What steps are taken to correct or prevent hazardous actions?
  • Management of change process (O) – Planning in regards to personnel, human resources and unions
  • Learning system (S) – An overall assessment of the current workplace safety training program
  • Health-safety management system component evaluation (S) – Does the system fit with its expected goals and mission?
  • Recognition, disciplinary and reinforcement program (S) – Recognize the positive, correct the negative in order to reinforce the health and safety program
  • Leading indicator component evaluation (S) – Looking over trends and correlations among past metrics to evaluate appropriate leading indicators
  • Communication of safety (S) – Clarity and frequency of communication of the safety program to all stakeholders
  • Safety perception survey (S) – Getting opinions and feedback about the effectiveness of the safety program.
  • Training (O) – Instruction and education in a safety program
  • Compliance (O) – How sticky are you to the standard operating procedures?
  • Prevention through design (O) – Making the design so specific that there is only one safe way to do something
  • Leadership engagement (Behaviors) – Managers and the C-suite showing engagement and commitment to the safety program
  • Employee engagement and participation (B) – Actions by employees to show commitment to safety
  • At-risk and safe behaviors (B) – Observations of both risky and safe actions by employees and management
  • Area observations/walkarounds (B) – Touring the worksite, observing actions, behaviors and tasks
  • Off-the-job safety (B) – Monitoring off-site incidents and accidents
  • Permit-to-work system (S) – Is there a formal procedure in writing to handle especially hazardous situations?
  • Equipment and maintenance (O) – Monitoring the “life” of equipment and ensuring special maintenance schedules