Many safety practitioners in industry spend a fair percentage of their time dealing with the measurement of safety performance. While some of the time may be rewarding and ultimately improve safety performance, one should ask how much of that time is truly value added to the extent that it is clearly linked to preventing people from getting hurt or becoming ill. The purpose of this paper is to simply communicate learnings from past successes and disappointments at ExxonMobil Development Company in the area of measuring safety. Other practitioners in the field of safety are encouraged to share their professional experiences. After all, it is these experiences that supply validity to the existing concepts and serve as an impetus for new concepts. Sharing one's professional experiences can clearly have a positive impact beyond the fences of your employer.
When one discusses safety with other professionals and groups of workers, the first thing that should be communicated is that safety is not about numbers. It is all about people and preventing them from getting injured or becoming ill. An organization should be measuring safety performance to understand whether they are doing those things that prevent accidents and illnesses, and whether those actions are truly effective in terms of actual injuries and illnesses. Ultimately the numbers will tell an organization whether they as a team are being effective. Theodore Ingalls summarized the reasoning for measurement very well in a recent article in Professional Safety. He stated that measuring performance 1) enables reasoned decisions and assessments, 2) allows comparison with previous (or others') performance, and 3) compares actual performance with planned performance.
Safety professionals should have a goal of helping the management team and the workers drive the numbers of injuries and illnesses in the work place to zero (or as close to zero as realistically possible). Recognizing that the organization will not likely get to zero injuries overnight, their performance is typically reflected as a downward trending curve over time. Given this simplest of curves, it is then reasonable to assume that their goal is to take the resources and knowledge that they have and effectively drive the curve downward (see Figure #1).
Figure #1 (available in full paper)
Safety metrics fall into two basic areas:
Leading indicators which are measurements linked to actions taken to prevent accidents
Trailing (or lagging) indicators which are measurements linked to the outcome of an accident.
Figure # 2 depicts Joe taking a fall. Those things that could have been done to prevent the slip, whether it be improving housekeeping, providing slip resistant soles, or training Joe to recognize the slipping hazard, could all be defined as leading indicators. Those measurements linked to the outcome of the event, whether it be type of injuries, OSHA recordability, or near miss reporting are all examples of trailing indicators. Both areas of safety metrics will be addressed in this paper.
Figure #2 (available in full paper)