By Hans Stacey 20/06/2017

Under: Site Set Up / Health and Safety News

Measuring Health and Safety: Lead vs Lag Data

In health and safety, we can divide data points into two main categories: leading and lagging indicators. Lagging indicators provide reactive measures and track evidence of poor practice. On the other hand, leading indicators deliver active measures which monitor health and safety systems and operational management.

The challenge for the health and safety practitioner: how do we identity the best indictors to help us make progress?

The Limitations of Lagging Indicators

Lagging indicators can include:

• Incident rates
• Near misses
• Lost production days due to work related injuries or illness
• Worker compensation costs
• Complaints of unsafe or unhealthy conditions

Lagging indicators tend to be relatively straightforward to measure and give us the opportunity to react to health and safety failings. Clearly, these are data points we need to keep track of: analysing mistakes allows us to make swift adjustments and prevent accidents reoccurring.

Unfortunately, there’s a significant problem with lagging indicators: you have to wait for something to go wrong to get any results. As chance plays a role in deciding when risks become accidents, it’s possible an organisation with terrible health and safety procedures could have excellent lagging indicators. You might get lucky, but it only takes so long for luck to run out.

Being Proactive: Why Leading Indicators are Important

The limitations of lagging indicators require us to expand our data points to include leading indicators which focus on preventative measures.

Leading indicators can include:

• Health and safety audits and inspections
• Employee training
• Safety culture and engagement

Leading indicators can be more time consuming and complex to collect and often need a longer time span to provide meaningful data. However, the insight is well worth the wait as it gives us the ability to be proactive. Leading indicator insights allow us to address potential issues before they become hazards and prevent incidents from occurring in the first place.

Combining Data Points

Effective analysis requires us to combine data points from both leading and lagging indicators. For example, you might choose to implement and track a new training program (a leading indicator). To assess its effectiveness, you could compare pre and post training measures of engagement (another leading indicator) as well and pre and post training incident rates (a lagging indicator). This combination helps you evaluate the training’s effectiveness and whether you need to make changes to future training programs or offer refresher courses.

There is no single reliable measure of health and safety performance. As health and safety professionals, we need to utilize a range of measures to get to the insight behind the numbers. After all, data isn’t much use unless it helps drive performance.

How are you measuring health and safety? Join the discussion on our Twitter page.

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