Glossary
What Are Safety KPIs?
Safety KPIs are the numbers used to measure a facility’s safety performance, and they fall into two types: lagging indicators, which measure what has already happened, such as the number of injuries and their rates, and leading indicators, which measure preventive activity before an incident occurs, such as the number of observations raised and the rate at which controls are closed on time.
Glossary Published 3 min read
01Two types
The difference between the two types, and why neither is enough alone
A lagging indicator tells a site what already went wrong; a leading indicator tells it what is being done to prevent the next thing from going wrong. A facility that only tracks lagging indicators finds out its safety performance is poor only after the injuries have happened, while one that only tracks leading indicators can lose sight of whether the preventive activity is actually working.
02Examples
Examples of each type
| Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Lagging | The number of injuries and their rate over a defined period. |
| Lagging | The TRIR figure for the current quarter. |
| Leading | The number of behavioural observations raised per month. |
| Leading | The rate at which controls are closed by their due date. |
03Selection
How a good indicator is chosen
A useful safety KPI is measurable without argument, has a named owner responsible for it, and leads directly to an action when it moves in the wrong direction. An indicator that meets none of these is a number on a slide, not a management tool.
04The trap
The indicator trap
A KPI stops measuring safety the moment the goal becomes improving the number itself rather than improving the underlying reality. A falling count of reported near misses can look like progress when it is actually a drop in reporting, and a site that rewards the number without checking which explanation is true is optimising the wrong thing.
05Context
In a Saudi context
Where a site depends on several contractor crews to report their own observations, a drop in one crew's leading-indicator numbers can reflect a genuine change in behaviour, a change in supervision, or simply a new crew unfamiliar with the reporting system, and the KPI on its own does not say which.
06The product connection
How this relates to SquintPRO
Continuous observation widens the base a leading indicator is drawn from, catching unsafe conditions the shift's own observation cards would otherwise have missed entirely. Read about the platform.
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