Every organization has its own way of measuring success. In occupational safety and health, the key to evaluating performance is understanding the relationship between leading and lagging indicators and the impact of safety initiatives on risk reduction.  

OSHA defines leading indicators as “proactive, preventive and predictive measures that provide information about the effective performance of your safety and health activities.” Lagging indicators are measurements to show that you’ve acheived the objectives you’re working toward, such as total recordable incident rate.

Joel Haight, Ph.D., P.E., CSP, CIH, FASSP, professor of industrial engineering at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh, conducted research on leading and lagging indicators to demonstrate how these metrics can help organizations increase efficiency and reduce incidents and injuries.

“The leading and lagging indictor discussion has gone on for many years, with most people leaning toward leading indicators,” says Haight. “We have to lean toward the relationship between the two.”

The Problem

Organizations spend billions of dollars each year responding to workplace injuries. That’s why many commit as much as a third of their available human resource time to activities meant to prevent injuries. But according to Haight, most do not measure the effectiveness of injury prevention efforts.

The Solution

Haight researched the safety interventions at a power company and an oil and gas company to examine the correlation between the resources applied to interventions and their impact on incident rates. One of the goals of the study was to determine at which point the allocation of safety resources stopped leading to a reduction in incident rates.

“In the case of safety and health management, the target (lagging indicator) is a reduction in injuries and a reduction in risk,” says Haight. “We have to draw the mathematical relationship and watch how the lagging indicators change in response to a change in the leading indicators.”

The Outcome

Haight’s research showed that when companies allocated more than 15% of available resources toward incident prevention, they began to see diminishing returns.In addition, while some companies are willing to allocate resources toward achieving zero incidents, that objective is likely impossible to achieve.

By understanding the connection between leading and lagging indicators, organizations can more effectively measure safety performance and better allocate resources toward reducing risks and achieving acceptable incident rates.

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