Using Leading Indicators to Prevent Workplace Injuries
By Joshua Sampia All companies have an obligation to create a safe work environment that allows their employees to do their jobs with minimal risk of injury. Most business understand their obligation to report accidents and illnesses to government agencies at the federal, state, and local level. What if you could use modern technology and trends to not only create a safer work environment but also prevent injuries from ever happening? This would save you time and money from completing reports, medical billing, and insurance claims, as well as reduce lost work time hours.
What are leading indicators?
Leading indicators are data points that can help predict future events and trends. This is where having a proactive safety culture comes into play. Leading indicators can be used to assess workplace culture in order to develop safety plans to minimize risk and increase productivity. OSHA defines leading indicators as “proactive and preventive measures that can shed light about the effectiveness of safety and health activities and reveal potential problems in a safety and health program.” The cost of worker’s compensation claims can range from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the nature of the incident. Having a program in place that can help prevent even one of those claims will automatically pay for itself. There also are many other intangible benefits like reduced costs for worker’s compensation insurance or a reduction in the number of fines. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Set Goals for Leading Indicators
Most companies have goals set for lagging indicators, such as a threshold for lost work time or number of injuries; however, your organization should also set goals for leading indicators, such as:
Attendance Rates
Safety Observations
Risk Assessments
Preventative Measures and Maintenance
The key to any good program is setting, identifying, and reaching quantifiable goals. For example, we work with a company that had historically relied on lagging indicators such as types of injuries, location, and work task to track injuries. Our team worked with them to implement a more observational approach focused on minimizing future occurrences. They formulated daily observation checklists of employees to determine if they were performing their tasks in an efficient and safe manner. That daily observation data was then aggregated and analyzed develop better safety and training programs. The change has helped reduce the number of injuries and accidents. Incidentally, productivity has also increased. Implementing this kind of process does not have to be a time-consuming process. The daily observations are short checklists of yes or no type questions that take approximately two minutes each day to complete. The checklist can be completed on mobile devices which most staff are currently using in their work tasks. The company also can share observations across multiple departments and shift supervisors to create a network of data for the entire business.
Technology and Software for Worker Safety
There are other examples of using modern data technology to help. Tracking employee training is a great way to ensure a good safety environment. Making sure employees are well-trained and that training is up to date is crucial to safety success. Another important aspect is that you must have a robust program in place to capture and analyze the data. A good system will:
let you easily capture all this information through multiple devices and portals
let you report the data back into multiple formats and reports
have a great dashboard to see a visual representation of the data
improve accountability
It is also critical to have traceability so it is clear who entered what data and when. This is extremely important when it comes to having a chain of evidence.
How can Cornerstone Help?
Cornerstone’s Incident Management and Training Tracking systems can capture all of this information as well a provide data reporting, visual representation, and more. Our applications have highly customizable systems that can adapt to literally any industry including automotive, manufacturing, medical, industrial as well as retail and warehousing. Each system is configured to each company’s specifications and requirements. This can also be accomplished at a cost-effective price point, especially when compared to the cost of having one accident on record. Contact us for details on how Cornerstone can help your facility establish an effective safety program using leading indicators and our industry-leading software systems.
Joshua Sampia is the Director of Product Development. He is responsible for the applications development team at Cornerstone, ranging from web based and mobile applications to device management for safety and environmental compliance and applicability.
