Safety Indicators in the Construction Industry
Safety indicators in the construction industry can be used to promote cost effective strategies and significantly improve safe practice on construction sites. The main purpose of using indicators is to track safety measure and adjust for continuous improvement in the construction process results. Many types of measurements are performed today that focus on monitoring and recording critical process and end results of construction projects to yield a better definition of key performance indicators. Finding performance indicators is important because they can be measured and compared to real work processes and focus attention on creating efforts to change the work environment into a high level safety zone.
Many companies have taken notice of OSHA and their research findings gathered on construction. OSHA has made clear that a positive way to handle improving site safety is to follow safety performance indicators. OSHA has promoted a technique using positive reinforcements and indicators to produce a more forthcoming worksite. An effective way to measure the performance of safety on the work site as suggested by OSHA is using a systems performance metrics. In doing this OSHA has solved problems such as how to measure the safety performance and how to determine the necessary indicators. “To effectively manage anything, you must first be able to successfully measure it-safety is no different and indicators are only accurate for safety enhancement when they target the correct area.”(6)
The safety metrics will be discussed later but first we must look at the elements that make up the metrics. The metric is designed to act like a formula. In this case the formula is balanced to equal incidents or accidents. On the other side of the equation are the leading indicators. For construction we look at four main indicators: