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As we've shared in previous blogs, Safety Observations create many Leading Indicators that help your workplace transition from reactive, Lagging Indicators, to a risk prevention centric safety strategy.  This transition puts your Safety Culture onto a sustainable, healthy path.

When the Zero recordables method was introduced, I had several concerns, as did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  First, it is still placing the emphasis on past performance.  Second, if you are the employee injured on the job on day 99 and plans are under way for the 100^th days without recordables celebration that is a lot of peer pressure not to report.

Let's look at what Safety Observations can offer in Leading Indicators:

Praise Observations: Highlighting an area, person, or condition you want others to observe and replicate.  Or, rewarding an employee's first steps at getting onboard the Safety Culture, such as wearing PPE without nagging.  We can derive the following leading indicators from these Praise Observations:

• Number of Praise reports.
• Number of employees/work areas/conditions Praised.
• Number of Praise reports per worksite/geographic location.
• Number of employees submitting Praise reports.

Prevention Observations: Drawing attention to a situation that should be corrected in order prevent a future safety incident.  From this process, we find the following leading indicators:

• Number of Prevention Reports per site.
• Number of employees
• Number of Safety Observations by site or department by day of week.
• Number of Safety Observations by site or department by hour of day.
• Net Return on Safety Investment, ROSI. The cost if the unsafe condition is not abated minus the cost to abate the condition.

At Simple Safety Coach, we are committed to making you, the Safety Professional, look good by ensuring you are able to show the hard work you have been doing without adding to your To Do list.   All of the above metrics are searchable by a date range.  All the graphs can be download as PNG files (a picture you can insert into your reports).  The graphs can also be inserted into presentations for employees, middle, or upper management.  You can have your annual report completed in minutes rather than hours. 

Stepping from public sector OSHA standard enforcement to working in private industry left me unprepared to monetize the value of the work (Return on Safety Investment) I was doing for the company.  It was from lessons learned from that experience which drove us to included this capability for our subscribers.  It is also another measure of how active and meaningful our efforts have been in "leading" down a path to fewer and less impactful safety incidents.