Towards a framework for steering safety performance: A review of the literature on leading indicators

Abstract

While remarkable progress has been made recently to improve the state of occupational safety, the number of occupational accidents is still unacceptable. In addition, the organizational costs related to these safety problems in the workplace are staggering. Therefore, effective strategies are needed to guide the continuous improvement of safety performance. Common approaches include setting safety goals, identifying the key activities/interventions to reach those goals, and evaluating performance. The most challenging and fundamental issue within these approaches is evaluating safety performance. While it has been a focus of safety professionals, concerns still exist among researchers with regard to how safety performance can be appropriately and accurately measured to improve decision support systems. Recently, researchers in the field of safety have begun directing efforts towards new approaches for measuring safety performance by addressing leading indicators. However, because of its nature and utility, the ideas and concepts of leading indicators have remained unclear. In an effort to overcome this challenge, this study attempts to distinguish between the two common aspects of safety performance, observable activities and outcomes. The importance of using leading indicators for steering safety performance is then highlighted. In order to meet these objectives, the results chain model, which has been introduced by several researchers for outlining the program development, is employed. The elements of the results chain model are then interrelated with relevant safety concepts. As a result, the relationship between the leading and lagging indicators and safety performance is identified. A set of leading indicators that predict safety performance is proposed. Further, the important implications of this study for both academic communities and practitioners are discussed as well.