Inspections and Severity: Two Leading Indicators to Use Today
- By Barry Nelson
- Jul 01, 2008
More and more, we see severity of unsafe observations being tracked as a leading indicator.
Currently, much thought and discussion are being given to leading indicators in the world of safety. Everyone is drawn to the promise of getting ahead or seeing the potential for injury before it is realized. Only recently has technology evolved to the point where we can start to review leading indicators in real time, providing safety professionals with a new perspective and suite of tools from which to work. This article will provide some common working definitions and then explain how you can begin to use two leading indicators—at no cost—that may help you achieve your injury reduction goals.
First, let’s define what we mean by leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators can be thought of as the loss metrics you already capture and record today. These are your incidents, recordable incident rates, lost-time accidents, etc. In one sense, lagging indicators measure an organization’s safety consequences in the form of past accident statistics. On the other hand, leading indicators are the precursors that may “lead” to an accident or injury. Some examples of leading indicators include frequency of training, completion of pre-task planning, and number of at-risk conditions and behaviors.
In our first example, we consider inspections to be our leading indicators and incidents to be our lagging indicators. Here, we consider a typical inspection to be comprised of 20-30 observations of work site conditions or behaviors.
Tying Your Inspections to Your Incidents
A question that is often posed is,“If I increase my inspections, will I reduce my incidents?” There are software solutions available on the market today that can track the number of inspections (leading indicator) against the number of incidents (lagging indicator). The graph in Figure 1 shows one real-life example of this relationship.
In Figure 1, we see a higher level of incidents (blue line) during the time total inspections are very low. Beginning in February 2007, we find inspections are trending up and, by April 2007, incidents are steadily declining. However, sometime in mid-May 2007, incidents have hit a plateau and inspections have begun to sharply drop off. By July 2007, inspections are down and incidents are trending up again.
Based on this graph, we see at least a loose relationship between inspections and incidents. As this company increases inspections, incidents tend to trend downward. There are many potential reasons for this correlation. Increasing inspections may indicate more inspectors participating in the observation process or current inspectors performing inspections more frequently. In both instances— more eyes out in the field or increased inspections—it is implied there is increased awareness and improved identification of hazardous conditions and behaviors. Greater frequency of inspections also may indicate an observation process is gaining footing and becoming standardized, consistent, and predictable, which is no doubt beneficial for reducing incidents.
Yet, in some cases (having had the opportunity to work closely with more than 150 customers who have amassed more than 40 million work site observations over the past six years), we have encountered situations where incidents have increased or showed no correlation as inspections increase. What would explain incidents increasing as inspections increase? One explanation would be that the number of inspectors is increasing but newer inspectors may be poorly trained—they may not know what areas to inspect or they may be inspecting the wrong areas. Individual competencies ultimately affect the quality of the observation information that is collected, which can then impact loss. Another reason that loss may continue to rise even though inspections are increasing is that the action taken is either inappropriate, ineffective, or not timely enough to prevent future incidents. For example, have we taken action to address and fix the system that is causing the at-risk behavior, or are we focused only on individual behaviors?
What is interesting is that in both cases—when inspections are going up and incidents are going down, or when inspections are going up but there is no impact on incidents—we are compelled to understand why that is. Without seeing the leading and lagging information together, it is very hard to begin planning the next phase of safety improvement.
Considering Severity as a Leading Indicator
More and more, we see severity of unsafe observations being tracked as a leading indicator. A pattern that you can expect as inspectors perform more inspections is an increase in the count of high-severity observations. Stated another way, more inspections lead to more high-severity items being recorded. As inspectors mature, they tend to become more consistent in spotting hazards and in recording observations of medium, high, and life-threat unsafe conditions and behaviors. Our observation is that as processes and safety cultures evolve, inspectors are often recognized and appreciated for noting high-severity unsafe observations and, therefore, become less fearful of pointing out unsafe conditions or behaviors. These types of behavior and culture change lay the groundwork for proactive intervention.
This article originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.