Most organizations measure safety performance by numbers because that’s what businesses are used to and senior managers are comfortable with. The numbers are clear and precise and achievements are measurable. You have either been successful or not.
Take for instance the target of "Zero Injuries" (or "Goal Zero" in the organization I have most recently worked for).
I have never been able to provide the plan that says that if I do A and B, I will be able to get zero injuries. This is very unlike the plan that says, if I close off bag acceptance 20 minutes before departure and dispatch the last barrow from the bag room at 17 minutes before departure and get the baggage belt removed from the aircraft at 5 minutes before departure, then we will get an on-time departure.
EVOLUTION OF SAFETY
The evolution of safety from lagging to leading indicators has only been marginally successful in preventing incidents. Having been part of this evolution, I have been frustrated that neither has led to serious safety improvements and, as a result, everyone has spent considerably more time focusing on behaviors and organizational safety cultures as a means of achieving significant safety improvements.
- Lagging indicators tell us the safety performance we have had.
I think by the time we report these, we all know we have suffered incidents, and anyone injured certainly knew our safety effort had failed. Traditionally with this approach, we review the incident rates, set new and aspirational targets and, generally, review why we were unsuccessful.
If we were successful, it is often through luck than anything else.
- Leading indicators are an attempt to rectify this by monitoring the causes of prior incidents in an attempt to monitor the safety environment so we can correct deficiencies before we have incidents.
Traditionally with this approach, we establish that near-misses are good predictors of hazardous conditions so we set targets for near-miss reports, analyse these for trends to see whether there is something we can do to eliminate the precondition of incidents.
The issue with this is that is you need to be more like a "day trader" in the stock market. For stocks, the day trader is receiving and analyzing stock data to try to pick the stock to buy or sell before the rest of the crowd. To use the analogy for safety, you would need to be receiving high quality near-miss information and analyzing it before an incident occurs. This is both dependent on quality information that we rarely have and being able to see the hazards and eliminate them quickly.
TRANSFORMATIONAL INDICATORS
Then I saw an article written by Shaun Galloway on Transformational Indicators.
These do not measure the lagging or leading indicators but, rather, look at the concept of contribution of value. For safety, these include emotions, knowledge levels, competence, behaviors, cultures and effective story-telling.
Consider these all for an airport environment:
Lagging indicators would be the number of injuries we have from catering activities, ramp activities, fueling activities or any other categorization we choose to make.
The leading indicators would include the measurement of what we believe may be the pre-cursor causes of these incidents including air-side driving infringements as an indicator of the potential to have a vehicle collision, reported soreness as a precursor to a manual handling injury, drug tests in the hope that we will prevent drug-affected employees hurting themselves or others.
Meanwhile, the transformational indicators focus on the knowledge of people and their self-management. For instance, attendance at training events is a leading indicator, but ensuring that ramp staff actually understand the hazard, potential consequence and why the procedure is as it is will be far more powerful in establishing the safety culture needed to prevent incidents and deliver the zero injury result that boards and senior management groups like to see.
There are some fundamental things that supervisors and leading hands need to do to get seriously good safety results:
- Spend time educating staff in the hazards they are likely to encounter and discuss these on a regular basis through toolbox or pre-start meetings.
- Listen to the workers to understand why they do not follow procedures and rules to be able to either change the procedures so to meet the needs of the task if safe to do so or enforce the current procedures and explain why.
- Challenge your managers and safety people by asking what each safety initiative will deliver and how because if they can’t link them, they won’t work.
- Finally, spend time on the ramp observing what is happening, pull people up when they are not performing properly and recognize those who do.
Oh, and managers, use transformational safety indicators and recognize the supervisors who achieve the safety culture needed to get the zero injuries result you crave, but understand that this is an outcome of transformational indicators, not the target!
