Safety Tidbit 6.01 – Leading and Lagging Indicators

 

Safety Tidbit 6.01 – Leading and Lagging Indicators

 

Reference: https://www.osha.gov/leadingindicators/docs/OSHA_Leading_Indicators.pdf

 

This Safety Tidbit was written by my student, Ms. Elaina Somogyi – a senior in the Safety Sciences Program at the Indiana University of PA graduating Summer 2021.

 

Safety, Health, and Environmental (SHE) professionals analyze leading and lagging indicators to improve workplace safety. To create a safe environment, SHE professionals must be able to identify leading and lagging indicators. SHE professionals must know how to find them, their benefits, and how to use them. Then, the SHE professional will use the data to encourage the employee's safety in the workplace.

 

First, SHE professionals must know what leading and lagging indicators are. According to OSHA, leading indicators are proactive, preventive, and predictive measures that provide information about your safety and health activities' adequate performance. They are used to measure events leading up to injuries, illnesses, and incidents to predict potential workplace problems before they happen. Leading indicators help create change in the workplace. SHE professionals can address the leading indicators in meetings and provide employees with training on preventing the incidents from occurring. By doing so, the SHE professional can decrease the number of injuries in the workplace and save the company money.

 

Lagging indicators measure the occurrence and frequency of events that have occurred in the past. The lagging indicator can include the number of incidents in the workplace. Lagging indicators can alert the SHE professional when there is a failure in a section of its health and safety program. Also, lagging indicators measure the effectiveness of a safety and health system. As a SHE professional, lagging indicators determine the focus areas for workplace health and safety improvement.

 

A SHE professional can use the SMART principles to determine if there are good leading indicators to use. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Reasonable, and Timely:

• Specific- Does your leading indicator provide specifics for the action taken to minimize risk from a hazard or improve a program area?
• Measurable- Is your leading indicator presented as a number, rate, or percentage that allows you to track and evaluate clear trends over time?
• Accountable- Does your leading indicator track an item that is relevant to your goal?
• Reasonable- Can you reasonably achieve the goal that you set for your leading indicator?
• Timely- Are you tracking your leading indicator regularly enough to spot meaningful trends from your data within your desired timeframe?

 

SHE professional can have workers attend monthly safety meetings. During the meetings, the SHE professional can address the lagging indicators, which are the work areas that need to be improved to ensure a safe workplace. Subsequently, members use the leading indicators during the meetings.

 

I hope this was helpful and thank you for reading my Safety Tidbits! Comments and questions are always welcome. ~ Bryan

 

P.S. If you have a new safety or health question, please let me know.