Leading and Lagging Indicators - What they are and the Surprising Reason you Need Both

How do you decide which metrics to guide your safety program?

Hey there,

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Safety First Journal.

Trying to base your safety program on only lagging indicators is like trying to drive forward while looking in the rear view mirror. At the same time, focusing only on leading indicators doesn’t tell you whether those indicators are meaningful in the real world. You need a blend of both to keep your program on track.

In this week’s edition, we’re going to talk about what leading and lagging indicators are, some examples of each, and why you need to pay attention to both in order to make your safety program the best it can.

Lagging indicators

A lagging indicator is a measure of events that have already happened in your safety program. It’s called a ‘lagging’ indicator because it’s happened in the past. Some examples of lagging indicators are:

· Total recordable injury rate (TRIR).

· Lost time incident rate (LTIR).

· Number of incidents in the past week/month/year etc.

· WCB surcharge.

These all reflect incidents that have happened in the past. And this is what many businesses and safety professionals focus on, to their detriment.

The reason lagging indicators are not sufficient by themselves is they have no predictive value.

Knowing that your TRIR is 1.5 this year tells you nothing about what it might look like next year. Furthermore, you don’t know what actions led to that result. Maybe your company does a great job when it comes to health and safety. Maybe it was luck. Without additional information, there’s no way to know. Which brings us to Leading Indicators.

Leading Indicators

Leading indicators are things you are doing in your business that are predictive actions taken to improve safety conditions in your workplace. Some examples are:

· Number of workplace inspections conducted per week/month.

· Number of safety observations in your behavioural safety program.

· Frequency of safety committee meetings.

· Number of managers with health and safety training.

These indicators all tell you about actions being taken to improve safety in your business, not just things that have happened in the past. The problem with leading indicators by themselves is that while we assume these actions to have a positive effect, it’s hard to know how specific leading actions correlate to actual results.

This is why you need both.

By combining your company’s past history of lagging indicators with your current actions, you can get a picture of whether your safety program is actually improving or getting worse and why.

A simple example

Let’s say your TRIR (lagging indicator) for the previous year was 2.5. While keeping other factors relatively stable, you instituted a comprehensive safety specific training program for your front line supervisors (leading indicator), and this year your TRIR dropped to 1.9. While obviously no safety intervention operates in a vacuum, in this simple example it’s reasonable to infer that the improved supervisor safety training played a role in reducing the incident rate.

The opposite can be true as well, perhaps despite the additional training, incidents went up vs. last year. In this case, perhaps lack of supervisor safety knowledge was not a limiting factor in your safety program and other measures need to be addressed.

The point is that by using both of these types of indicators, you can get an accurate picture of the current state of your safety program and what interventions are working and which ones may not be relevant.

Additional Reading

Here is some further reading on this topic you might find useful:

· Institute for Work and Health: Leading OHS indicators

· CCOHS: CCOHS: Health and Safety Programs - Leading and Lagging Indicators

· OHS Blog: 10 Key Leading and Lagging Indicators of Safety Performance

That’s it for this week.

If you liked this content, I also ghostwrite newsletters, thought leadership articles and educational email courses for OHS professionals. Feel free to reach out if you’d like more information.

Until next week,

Cheers,

Dan.