Most people now recognize the importance of developing a strong culture that supports safety. The primary key to developing a strong safety culture is generally considered to be a function of top leadership. However, there are other ways culture can be developed, especially with the visible support of leadership. One of the keys to developing a strong safety culture is to establish and implement safety metrics that influence an organizations' culture and drive safety performance. This article provides some suggestions about the kinds of measures and related approaches to accomplish this goal.
Safety professionals know there are some good applications for trailing measures, such as trend analysis and evaluating the effectiveness of safety initiatives. The problem many organizations encounter is the measures they utilize do not contribute to the development of the safety culture. The safety culture is unlikely to be positively impacted when trailing indicators are the only measures an organization uses, or when the major focus, such as 80% of the emphasis, is put on trailing indicators.
Leading indicators measure the activities, behaviors and processes, the things people are actually doing for safety, and not simply the safety-related failures typically tracked by trailing measures. To make a distinction about the two aspects of performance, Stolovitch and Keeps define performance as follows: "Performance is a function of both the behavior and accomplishment of a person or a group of people. Performance includes the actions of a person or people and the result of the action or actions" (Stolovitch & Keeps, 8) The measurement of true performance, especially applied to safety, includes a mix of trailing indicators (accomplishments, results, outcomes) and leading indicators (behaviors, processes and activities).
The ANSI Z10 standard encourages this mix of safety measures. Part 6.1 entitled Monitoring, Measurement and Assessment from the ANSI Z10 Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems includes the following statement from the right-hand column ("should" or recommendations column):
"E6.1 – The purpose of these processes is to help evaluate the performance of the management system by measuring its effectiveness in controlling and reducing risk. Organizations should develop predictive or "leading" performance measures or indicators. The organization can use these measures to identify and correct problems and identify opportunities for risk reduction before injuries or illnesses occur. The leading indicators can be used in combination with carefully collected injury and illness rates to measure performance. Some examples of indicators of potential problem areas are human factors risks, near-miss incidents, and non-conformances found during inspections." (ANSI Z10, p. 18)
And,
"E6.1C – These (injury and illness) rates, however, should rarely be the sole or primary tool to evaluate performance of an OHSMS [Occupational Health & Safety Management System], for several reasons. Primarily, these rates measure the very injuries, illnesses and material losses that a management system is trying to prevent. When injury indicators are the only measure, there may be significant pressure for organizations to "manage the numbers" rather than improve or manage the process." (ANSI Z10, p. 19).
