Safety Leadership

Typically, safety performance is measured based on lagging indicators which are derived from safety statistics of incidents that have already happened. In other words, safety performance has a direct correlation with lagging indicators - the higher the value, the worse the performance. Therefore, most industries are striving to achieve zero as a safety performance indicator by investing an immense effort in managing lagging indicators. 

While this approach continues to deliver impressive results, more and more organizations are also starting to recognize the importance of leading indicators, which are intended to proactively anticipate an outcome before it occurs, such as pre-task safety meetings or employee engagement programs. Contrary to lagging indicators which are easily measured based on documented historical data in the form of safety statistics, most leading indicators are, by their nature, a challenge to measure, and therefore it is difficult to provide a tangible hard evidence for their Return On Investment. More so, any attempt to systemize and measure leading indicators eventually renders them as ineffective and empty practices whereby people simply “go through the motion” to get them done. As a result, leading indicators are generally considered as a distinct and complimentary investment, often subject to the availability of extra time and funds.

But if we consider the above Humaneyes Formula for Safety Performance, a different reality emerges. With this safety performance formula, leading indicators are as important and indispensable ingredient as the lagging ones. To embrace them as such, it is important to accept the fact that they are mostly organic by nature, and consequently we must loosen our obsession with the need to measure them. In fact, the magic is in the quality of human engagement. If our interactions are based on the value of empathy, then the quality of our engagements allows us to constantly and proactively surface an infinite number of leading indicators to deal with - making our proposed formula way more effective. 

With empathy, being our ability to fully comprehend the experience of others without judgement, people feel understood, appreciated, and valued for who they are. Therefore, what we receive in return from others is largely influenced by the empathy they experience from us. 

This is where Humaneyes comes in. Humaneyes is Leadership through Empathy and Engagement. It is an approach that instills empathy as a core value with profound impact on the quality of engagement, communication, collaboration, proactivity and creativity. Humaneyes causes a positive shift in culture, the by-product of which is unexpected breakthroughs in all areas of performance, including safety. It is the catalyst that propels the denominator of our formula to grow and effectively drive safety performance towards the desired value. In other words, we Humaneyes Safety.