As the debate in OSH regarding metrics and lagging indicators rages on, there is one aspect to their use that far too many overlook. If your organization is setting goals using lagging indicators, it should at least be using them correctly. This means that BOTH FREQUENCY and SEVERITY need to be measured. I am sure most of us have seen the weakness in measuring the overall injury/illness rate and NOT measuring the severity of the injuries.
I have seen far too many organizations have an injury rate in the top 5% of their industry and yet have multiple fatal events and multiple life-altering injury events, only to celebrate the injury rate at the end of the year AND reward management for this. As I have discussed before, using the SIF model will aid in moving from this asinine approach to managing OSH in high-risk workplaces; however, getting management to consider making this shift in metrics is like getting a heroin addict sober! But there is a sound approach to this model…
Simply set a three-tier metric using:
- Serious/Recordable Injury Frequency,
- Days Away-Restricted-Transfer (DART) severity rate,
- Fatality/Life-Altering rate
We use the same formula to calculate all of the rates. Yes, I understand that establishing fatality/life-altering goals implies that management accepts these events will occur. This is why it is so hard to break this lagging indicator dependence – when management is faced with a previous year of fatalities and life-altering injuries, it should be a wake-up call that something is seriously “broken” in their attempts to manage safety.
But if we stand a chance to bring attention to the LOW FREQUENCY-HIGH SEVERITY events, we must establish these lagging indicator goals across the spectrum of severity. And if we plan to reward management based on these lagging indicators, we START with the Fatality/Life-Altering Rate Goal. If this goal is NOT met, then it matters not what the DART and Recordable rates are.
As safety professionals, we MUST recognize the flaws in these rates! In the overall injury rate from our 300 Log, a fatality counts the same as an antibiotic prescription for a 2nd-degree burn the size of a dime. So the recordable rate does a horrible job of indicating true severity; we need the means to measure the severity.
And yes, I have been in some interesting discussions with senior leaders that just refuse to accept the concept of establishing a fatality rate. They just fundamentally refuse to accept any fatalities. But these organizations have fatal events annually. When challenged about what they do daily to manage these risks, this group has no idea as to the specific efforts being made to manage fatal risks in their workplaces. So I’ll calculate the fatality rate over 10 years and then establish a reduction of that RATE by 25%. It is a starting point, as with this GOAL comes an actual SMS plan with SPECIFIC exercises/activities that will focus resources on those tasks and risks that have caused fatalities in the past. It gets really interesting and heated when we begin to examine those previous fatalities, and we can identify trends. But this is the value of lagging indicators – looking at the big picture and identifying opportunities to reduce risks!
