Page 37 - Occupational Health & Safety, January 2018

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY
Your Year-End Safety Celebration Could Be Hiding Risk
We can’t use lagging indicators—counting what has already happened— to evaluate our exposure to risk accurately.
BY NICK GOODELL
www.ohsonline.com
JANUARY 2018 | Occupational Health & Safety 31
It’s that time of the year when we reflect back on how our companies performed over the last 12 months. A common calculation is to look at re- corded injury rates (using a variety of prescribed
metrics) and pat ourselves on the back if we hurt few- er people than we had planned. I was just part of such a meeting, the typical construction company’s period-
ic gathering of Safety, Project, and Engineering folks where the executives congratulated the team because only two people got hurt on a recently concluded project. There were high fives, awards, and lots of cel- ebration (except from the two injured). But there is a fundamental problem with the way that most compa- nies evaluate safety in the workplace. By counting the
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