Early in my career, I trained under the slogan, “Drive down frequency and you will drive down severity.” While this was a sincere and well-intended statement from leadership, it exemplifies an approach to addressing serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) in the workplace that has not produced the results we hoped for.
National Safety Council / Injury Facts from 1992-2023National Safety Council / Injury Facts from 1992-2023
For decades, our strategy has been built on the assumption that reduced frequency would reduce severity. By default, this created a hyperfocus on preventing minor to moderate incidents. Further exacerbating the issue is the over-investment of resources in the things that hurt us the most, rather than the things that hurt us the worst. If this sounds like a big, established and well-worn groove of a system, you’re right! But take courage, there’s much that we can do to begin turning the tide for the construction industry, and it starts with understanding SIF risk.
SIF Risk is Uniquely Different and Requires Its Own Dedicated Strategy
There’s a bit of a conundrum safety professionals face: If we experience a period without an incident, our organizations tend to believe that operations are good, resources are sufficient, and we must be doing the “safety” thing very well. There’s a state of complacency that goes along with proclaiming, “One year without recordable incidents!” The most accurate view is captured by another familiar phrase: The absence of injuries does not indicate the presence of safety.
SIF risk is unique because it exists as potential. It has lethal energy that requires a safeguard to prevent its release to the worker. To understand how these safeguards work, consider “failing safely” in the event of a fall. A fall protection system arrests a worker’s unexpected fall from height. Another example is a trench box placed to prevent a worker from being smothered in a trench collapse.
However, there’s also a more sinister SIF risk that exists when a change requires a worker to choose between communicating risk and completing a project on time. For example, suppose an increase in the scope of work expands the original boundaries of a task and requires a worker to climb higher than they previously thought. In that case, they need to ask themselves, “Do I disconnect from my anchor point to reach this area and keep the project on time? Or do I stop, communicate the change in risk and get support?” This is just one example of how SIF risk is multiplied. When we factor in changing or diminished resources to safely accomplish work — for example, crew size, equipment, or PPE — we add an additional level of complexity, where a worker’s risk has increased without the resources to manage it safely.
Workers are highly adaptable when challenged with solving an unexpected problem. But they need a process that informs them when and where SIF risk is present in their work environment before they begin, as well as resources to manage that risk competently. They must also know they have full support to stop work when SIF risk conditions change.
Identifying and Prioritizing SIF Risk
SIF risk is different from other forms of risk and requires its own dedicated strategy. At a conference earlier this year, I asked a room full of risk and safety professionals to raise their hands if their organization had a risk assessment process. Everyone raised their hands, which was good. I then asked them to raise their hands if their organization had a dedicated SIF risk assessment process. Only some raised their hands, confirming my suspicion that advancing SIF intervention will require improvements from the safety profession as much as from our business and industry partners.
So, how does an organization know where to begin in assessing its own capabilities and SIF prevention strategy? Fortunately, there’s been incredible work done in this space over the past several years. One particularly successful process is to incorporate a dedicated SIF strategy within an established Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) process. Our friends and industry leaders at the National Safety Council have been among those leading the way in providing free resources within the framework of a safety management system. The plan of action unfolds in the SIF Prevention Model:
Plan: Evaluate organizational capacity for SIF prevention and preparation for action.
Do: Conduct initial SIF hazard identification alongside evaluation of safeguards.
Check: Verify the effectiveness of safeguards and establish monitoring and continuous assessment to ensure efficacy.
Act: Learn and improve, driving continuous improvement in SIF prevention strategy.
Addressing SIF Within the Modern Workforce
SIF prevention must be an integrated approach that accounts for our modern methods of accomplishing work. Today’s labor strategy increasingly relies on third-party labor to accomplish an organization's mission. As such, success in today’s modern workforce requires an effective, systems-based approach that extends beyond compliance and is coupled with an effective strategy for monitoring and assessing risk. In simple terms, this is an increase in meaningful engagement on SIF prevention between the client and the multitude of contractors they depend on. As the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey results clearly show, organizations that increase engagement show up to 68% improvement in safety performance.
Companies must also prioritize meaningful engagement within their workforce. In a complex work environment, creating transparency and illumination throughout the lifecycle of labor can be accomplished through integrating the PDCA process mentioned earlier.
One successful practice is creating opportunities to hear feedback from the contracted workforce on matters pertaining to SIF risk and continual improvement, however, it requires a dedicated process to do so. The visual below shows one example of an integrated approach that aligns traditional compliance and qualifications with the first stage of the PDCA process. This systems-based approach is proving invaluable for aligning multiple management systems in the SIF prevention discussion.
Avetta
Within a systems-based strategy, some organizations are successfully deploying additional methods, such as:
1. Focus on Severity-Based Lagging Indicators (SBLI): While still valued as regulatory required reporting, a traditional metric like total recordable incident rate does not have predictive qualities or provide the context needed to evaluate safety history properly and fairly. SBLI, on the other hand, does possess a higher degree of predictive qualities.
2. Prioritize Leading Indicator Activity: Visual management of high-hazard opportunities helps confirm when actions are completed, the status of each activity, and whether SIF risk has been identified and reduced to acceptable levels.
3. Organizational Learning: Learn and improve or blame and punish. You cannot do both, so choose learning and improvement. Organizational learning requires a dedicated PDCA process while integrating useful strategies that satisfy both leading indicators and improvement, such as the Avetta Safety Maturity Index. Organizations have the opportunity to create an environment of continual improvement within their supply chain, integrated into their SIF prevention strategy.
As Thomas Krause states in 7 Insights into Safety Leadership, “Safety leadership starts with attention to serious injuries and fatalities.” Safety is changing for the better, as there is a groundswell of recognition that current methods and techniques for limiting recordable injury rate do little to prevent fatalities. Moving the needle in SIF prevention requires moving beyond traditional compliance frameworks, both for our traditional employees and the contracted workforce.
