New IWH study tackles leading indicators to help prevent illnesses, injuries
The Ontario Leading Indicators Project (OLIP) aims to identify leading indicators to help prevent injuries and illnesses at workplaces before they occur — as opposed to most performance measurement tools which look at injury and illness rates after they happen, or lagging indicators.
More than 1,700 businesses across a wide landscape of industries took part in the survey, such as those from the agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, construction and service industries.
The survey itself includes a number of questions based on managerial and organizational practices surrounding the health and safety culture at a particular office. That includes five umbrella policy groups: health and safety practices, health and safety leadership, ergonomics, disability management and prevention and employee engagement.
The OLIP’s defining attribute is that it requires only health and safety representatives to answer the questions — most other surveys measure as many employees as possible, said Benjamin Amick, a senior scientist at IWH.
"We wanted to talk to the one person who was most knowledgeable about health and safety in the organization," he said. "It provides information that empowers the health and safety group within the company, the health and safety representative if it’s a smaller company, or the manager or owner if it’s even smaller."
As well, the OLIP also includes an organizational performance metric, a safety climate tool and a joint health and safety committee tool to help determine overall leading indicators. Its final component, the occupational health and safety management system, includes a number of measures — OHS policy, worker participation, OHS training, communication, preventive and protective actions, emergency response, monitoring and review, procurement and contracting, and benchmarking.
The latter is another tool unique to the OLIP. Benchmarking reports are provided for each company, showing exactly where they lie on the health and safety spectrum compared to other like-companies in the industry.
Though the OLIP is still in its adolescence and data is still being disentangled, one notable result has emerged: There is no one notable result.
Amick said one of the more interesting findings is there is no one leading indicator that plays a factor in the health and safety of a workplace.
"One of the more interesting findings is that there isn’t one thing — it’s really quite variable," he said. "It looks like most of these tools are relevant cross-sector, and they are relevant for small and large firms."
The IWH enlisted provincial health and safety associations, including Mississauga, Ont.-based Workplace Safety and Prevention Services (WSPS), to recruit participators.
Because the OLIP provides a gap analysis, workplaces are better suited to understand current strengths, areas for improvement, and puts them in a more knowledgeable position should they reach out to third-party health and safety consultation firms, said Kiran Kapoor, WSPS’s director of business and market strategy.
"I view leading indicators as actionable data," she explained. "It provides a business (with) a snapshot of how they’re performing related to health and safety relative to others in their business. It can help them focus more on their performance measurements and what they potentially need to improve upon, or identify gaps that they may need to focus on a little more."
After working with hundreds of companies on the survey, Kapoor said tackling performance measurement tools can be a daunting task.
"Often organizations can get overwhelmed with the amount of measures or performance metrics that may be collected in an organization — but with leading indicators, it’s important to know you can start small," she said. "Some of the things you’re already doing, such as collecting information on joint health and safety activities, training, audits, inspections — those all could be used as a starting point to build leading indicators into your workplace."
Streamlining safety measurement tools is a trend quickly catching on. Over in Saint John, N.B., WorkSafeNB, alongside the IWH, implemented another safety measurement tool, the Organizational Performance Metric (OPM) — a more efficient way of measuring leading indicators in the province.
Firms that fare better on the OPM questionnaire typically have fewer accidents., according to Anne Lise Albert, assistant director of program development and evaluation at WorkSafeNB. She lauded the OLIP study, noting some overlapping themes between the two.
"It’s much simpler — this won’t take an hour and a half (compared to our old survey)," she said. "It does have a lot of questions. And I understand their desire to ask a lot of questions. Then, when you crunch the numbers, you determine which one of those are a predictor of accident statistics, and then you can refine your questionnaire, but for right now it looks like it’s very comprehensive."
Currently, the IWH is combining survey data with information from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s data (such as injury claims rates) to help determine which leading indicators are related to claims.
