Articles Tagged with ''leading indicators''

Along with a multitude of PDCs, networking opportunities and special events, Safety 2014 will feature seminars intended to help attendees increase the success of their safety management systems and improve communication with management.

From contentions that OSHA is turning radical to disagreements over the meaning of the term, “safety culture,” the ISHN Blog served as a forum for a wide range of opinions. Here are some of the most-viewed posts of 2013:

The current administration looks to Saul Alinsky’s “Twelve Rules for Radicals” for their guidance. OSHA has now stepped in this direction and away from safety principles. Their first foray was the Shaming Press Releases.

I have heard that OSHA may ban safety incentive programs. My company has used an employee incentive program that provides a bonus for meeting quality, productivity, and safety performance targets. The program has been very successful, has reduced injuries and is popular with employees.

The safety job has matured, and will continue to do so – that was one of the takeaways from last week’s National Safety Congress & Expo, sponsored by the National Safety Council.

The Campbell Institute – the National Safety Council’s center of excellence for environmental, health and safety management – has introduced a new white paper, “Transforming EHS Performance Measurement through Leading Indicators” at the 2013 NSC Congress & Expo.

Many safety pros are exasperated by their senior leadership’s slavish devotion to tracking OSHA recordables, lost-time incidents, severity rates and fatalities. In a way, you can’t blame them when their pay bonuses are based on these numbers, and the numbers represent pretty much all senior leaders know about safety.

Nearly every safety professional worth his or her salt has been told that he or she needs to look at both leading and lagging indicators; it’s good advice, in fact, it’s advice I’ve given many times in articles and speeches over the years.  But in my last post (two weeks ago—I spent the last week at a customer site and with the travel travails I just couldn’t bring myself to hammer out a post, deepest apologies to my fans and detractors alike) I questioned the value of tracking (not reporting or investigating, mind you, just tracking) near misses.

The search for viable leading indicators to replace lagging injury statistics is a hot safety topic these days. I do not believe we will ever be rid of injury rates as a metric used to judge safety performance.