Matt O'Neil, vice president of health, safety, environment and quality (HSEQ) for Covestro.
It's not exactly breaking news that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But that revered wisdom is especially true when it comes to performance indicators across the HSE landscape.
According to Matt O'Neil, vice president of health, safety, environment and quality (HSEQ) for Covestro, "the leading indicators are the things that are proactive -- in advance, before the fact, avoiding those failures."
"The sooner that you start with leading indicators, the better impact you can have on the lagging indicators," he said in a presentation titled "Choosing the Best Leading Indicators for HSE Performance" at the 32nd Annual Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) Seminar held recently in Galveston, Texas.
Leading indicators are generally positive and, in O'Neil's opinion, can't be implemented early enough, while lagging indicators are generally negative.
Lagging indicators are also reactive by nature; they come into play "after the fact and responding to failures," O'Neil said. "Something's already happened, and there's nothing you can do after that, unfortunately.
"They are the type of indicators that our company typically measures us by -- and maybe determines our bonus by. And they're also, in some cases, in our annual reports."
HSE assessments and audits
Leading indicators should drive HSE performance, O'Neil explained, be "linked" to a lagging indicator and "be able to be influenced."
"What good is a KPI (key performance indicator) or a PI (performance indicator) if you can't do something actively to influence that?" he asked.
Leading indicators should also result in incremental improvements.
"That means we're taking action. If that curve is lifting off of flat, you're doing something good," he said. "If you don't measure it, you can't improve it."
O'Neil emphasized the need for leading HSE indicators to require "the least amount of work" to report.
"These complex KPIs should not take an extra assistant to be able to calculate," he said. "It should be something that's very easy and everybody understands."
Specifically, HSE indicators should be easily understood by non-HSE personnel "because they're the ones who influence it," O'Neil said. "They have to understand what our drivers are."
O'Neil encouraged HSE managers to proactively conduct ergonomic risk assessments as well as biometric screenings and physical exams.
"We need to drive those so that, if that's your company's requirement, everybody gets that screening by the end of the year -- or whatever your target is," he said.
Lab hygiene audits are equally important, he said, though often forgotten.
"There is a lot of potential for exposure there as well. What percentage of your labs have you audited, and how frequently?" O'Neil asked.
Noise surveys also lend themselves to being formulated into a leading indicator. The surveys provide the data, but it is incumbent upon companies to respond to that data to address the issue, O'Neil said.
"I don't know about your plant, but our plant is very loud, so we have to really get on top of that," O'Neil said. "We're looking at what we can do as a leading indicator to try to head off hearing loss.
"We have people who are not quite up to that 10-decibel loss. We don't know if it's occupational or personal."
Regardless, workers are provided with coaching and custom-molded earplugs to prevent hearing loss "from becoming a failure and then contributing to our lagging indicators."
Exposure monitoring, fit testing and respiratory PPE can also help influence leading indicators.
"Some of that is required," O'Neil concluded. "But you can always go over and beyond."
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