Page 38 - Occupational Health & Safety, January 2018

CONSTRUCTION SAFETY
External pressures from regulators like OSHA, insurers, and customers conditioned us to use lagging indicators as a measure of safety. We found that companies that often view a safety risk assessment as a measure of compliance have a higher exposure and cost of risk.
number of bad things that have been recorded, you see only part of the picture—the lagging indicators—which can cause potentially significant blind spots to risk exposure.
Consider instead evaluating safety performance with measures that don’t require incidents to occur. Aside from issues with un- derreporting, misclassification of recordable injuries, or sloppy re- cordkeeping, I propose that workplace safety is much more than just the absence of adverse events. We can’t use lagging indica- tors—counting what has already happened—to evaluate our expo- sure to risk accurately.
What if we measured other things the way most companies measure workplace safety?
Think back to a summer road trip. How did you gauge whether your vehicle was prepared to make the trip? Did you assess the con- dition of your car solely by counting the times it had broken down in the prior 12 months? For me, it would follow that my car is in excellent mechanical condition, ready for any road because it did
not break down at all in the past year. Would you trust your fam- ily’s safety solely by a lagging indicator? Evaluating your corporate safety risk management program is no different.
Instead, most of us measure a vehicle’s condition using leading indicators: signs that predict a failure before it occurs. These in- clude adherence to a recommended maintenance schedule, annual state inspections, and resolving odd things noticed during opera- tion. If you change the transmission fluid and find metal in the oil, you can be sure of a problem. So why don’t we use leading indica- tors to evaluate how prepared our companies are to manage risk in the coming year?
External pressures from regulators like OSHA, insurers, and customers conditioned us to use lagging indicators as a measure of safety. For these groups, this is a universal and straightforward way to evaluate for enforcement, intervention, premium increases, and past performance as a poor safety prediction tool. This paradigm will only worsen as OSHA becomes increasingly dependent on lag- ging indicators collected more broadly through electronic report- ing requirements. We found that companies that often view a safety risk assessment as a measure of compliance have a higher exposure and cost of risk.
Through safety observation programs, best-in- class companies are regularly collecting valuable data about the behaviors and conditions that are occurring on their work sites.
Putting Leading Indicators to Work
A more appropriate way to evaluate your performance is through the use of safety leading indicators. These are the collection and study of the conditions, behaviors, and attitudes that signal an en- vironment where losses are more likely to occur.
Using our previous car analogy, one type of leading indicator is the “maintenance” that you performed on your team last year. This includes the training, education, certifications, and other creden- tials that your team has invested over the past year. How are you maintaining your folks, and how are those records being used? The structure of your programs should reflect a high level of proficien- cy in the types of work you are performing and expertise with the tools in use. Collecting the right kind of data will expose whether your company was going through the motions last year or if the workers were building competencies that are genuinely protecting your business from loss.
Through safety observation programs, best-in-class companies are regularly collecting valuable data about the behaviors and con- ditions that are occurring on their work sites. A quality inspection program paints a real picture of how much risk you are exposed to and from which areas. Companies that hide behind “All Safe” in- spection observations or use their inspection programs in a puni- tive way are missing the opportunity to collect real leading indica- tors of injuries. Aggregation of detail data in safety software allows the ability to drill down and compare risks across your company, your projects, your contractors, and crafts.
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