The Safety of Work Podcast - What Is the Relationship Between Leading and Lagging Indicators?

The paper we use to frame today’s discussion is Leading or Lagging? Temporal Analysis of Safety Indicators on a Large Infrastructure Construction Project.

Topics:

• Similarities between Economists and safety professionals.
• Definitions of performance measures.
• The researchers methods for this study.
• What the data showed about this particular organization.
• Errors in human reporting.
• Practical takeaways from the study.

Quotes:

“One definition of a performance measure or indicator should be...the metric used to measure the organization’s ability to control the risk of accidents.”

“There’s lots of things in nature that aren’t supposed to generate bell curves.”

“Safety is performed by humans, who react to the things that they see.”

Resources:

Lingard, H., Hallowell, M., Salas, R., & Pirzadeh, P. (2017). Leading or lagging? Temporal analysis of safety indicators on a large infrastructure construction project. Safety science, 91, 206-220.

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