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Creating Leading Indicators and Balanced H&S Metrics

As a leader, what you measure and how you respond to the results drives the behavior of individuals and your organization as a whole.  If you measure or respond the wrong way, you will get unintended results.  We see this situation occurring in many organizations, especially in the realm of safety.  The failure of well-intended organizations to select and appropriately manage their safety measures/metrics is creating an insidious degradation of their safety and operational culture.

If you have this dynamic going on in your organization, it may be time to rethink your H&S measurement processes and metrics.

  • A belief that the safety programs/controls are robust and therefore injuries are the fault of the injured
  • When injuries occur management becomes frustrated with their safety programs, practitioners and initiatives – they can’t figure out what to “fix”
  • Getting caught off guard by serious injuries and fatalities
  • Dissecting parking lot injuries meanwhile ignoring high risk areas
  • Safety professionals spending most of their time chasing incidents – trying to prove that an incident shouldn’t be an OSHA Recordable (to meet the goals/objectives)
  • Equating the organizations risk level to its injury rates
  • Failure to perform effective causal analysis – fixing symptoms not reasons
  • The behavior of managers/supervisors who don’t understand how to meet their injury rate goals drives injury reporting “underground”
  • Employees and labor unions become disenchanted with the leadership’s value for safety and the overall  safety approach

Effective leading indicators have the following attributes:

  • They measure failure potential, not failures
  • They are “process health” indicators
  • They are straightforward to understand and address

The following are some of the services that we offer:

  • Assessing the present state of your metrics and the perceptions and actions they produce in your organization
  • Assessing the safety processes and systems in your organization
  • Building and facilitating an advisory team in your organization
  • Creating meaningful metrics that are predictive of outcomes
  • Matching metrics to responsibilities
  • Educating the management team
  • Assessing the ongoing health of your metrics
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