This studied 8 conventional performance indicators from 47 construction projects to see if a greater number of leading indicators, site inspections or toolboxes led to a lower lagging indicator frequency.
First, no relationship was found between number of medical injuries and safety talks or site inspections. A small relationship was found between number of first aid injuries and both toolbox talks/site inspections.
Findings support other studies that “causality between leading and lagging indicators is not as simple as once suggested” (p. 419).
Notably, the assumption that site inspections are a good leading indicator is not strongly supported by evidence. They refer to research which suggested that site inspections act more like lagging indicators. In any case, while counts of inspections, safety talks etc. may provide some indication of an organisation’s activity, they are said to be “relatively coarse measures that are often quite far removed from injury events on the causal pathway” (p420).
They suggest that site inspections shouldn’t be used so much as a leading indicator, and better indicators around climate, the quality of hazard response and other things [e.g. design], should be considered.
Also, the relationship between lead/lag indicators, when based on a single company, had “minimal to no prevention effect when examined within the entire project period rather than segments of time within the project”(p.420).
They suggest a challenge is that the indicators used by companies may not allow them to see the positive effect of injury prevention in their workplace. They offer that this may be because the metrics used to evaluate safety prevention aren’t effectively showing the strengths of the prevention, the methods to examine the effects are too complex for a construction contractor to measure, or maybe the prevention methods just aren’t effective.
Further, they argue that if leading indicators (which the leading & lagging terminology is misleading anyway due to them changing directions), like management commitment as a leading indicator, then there “needs to be an understanding of where management commitment fits in the accident causation model, and what other factors are in play in order to appropriately measure the effect” (p420).
In my view, there’s cooler stuff when it comes to indicators being done in the systems theory area and Resilience Engineering.
Authors: Katelyn Versteeg, Philip Bigelow, Ann Marie Dale, Ashok Chaurasia, 2019, Safety Science
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.06.035
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/utilizing-construction-safety-leading-lagging-measure-ben-hutchinson/?published=t
SafetyInsights.org 