

- Leading Indicators — They focus on future events used to drive and measure safety activities for preventing and controlling injuries. In other words, they measure a company’s culture and its management system’s integrity and performance. Leading indicators include things like safety training, employee perception surveys, safety audits, safety inspections, and behavior sampling.
- Lagging Indicators — They focus on measuring progress toward compliance with safety rules and regulations. Put another way, they measure workplace incidents in the form of past accidents and injuries. They include things like the frequency and severity of injuries, lost workdays, and total compensation costs. Lagging indicators tell you how many people got hurt and how badly, but not how effective your system is.
- Performance Targets (Goals) are based on good data, in-depth analysis, an understanding of risk improvement, sound baselines, and the causes and preventability of accidents. Often, they focus on a company’s safety management processes. In addition to including things like reductions in lost time and medically treated injuries, good performance targets can include the number of audits opened/closed and time, the percentage of PPE compliance, and employee participation rate.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are objective and easy to gauge and collect, reliable and immediate indicators of performance levels, cost-effective to gather, and owned and understood by the organization.
- The number of injuries per year
- Amount of training delivered compared to the original plan
- Environmental indicators
- Investigations closed within so many days
- Attendance levels
- Days lost per FTE
- Number of specific illnesses

