Safety troughing, and plateauing should be scary for most of us. Of course, many individuals may get concerned when lagging indicators, like recordable injury or illness rates have flattened or troughed-out, but what about other indicators? Are you appropriately concerned about what may be causing your troughs and why your leading indicators plateaued? Certainly, this should be of even more concern.
What are you measuring and what are you doing with your data? Do you have access to big-data or data from varied sources and data points that lead you to intervene in very definitive ways? How about medium-data from audits or safety climate surveys – are you drilling deeper, looking for ways to limit your plateauing? And how about small-data that evolve from one-on-one conversations or focus groups? How revealing is it, how well are you managing it, and how deep are you drilling into it?
All safety leaders should be concerned about overcoming extended troughing and plateauing, but don’t simply rely on one or two measures, like your injury or illness rates. Look upstream at large, medium, and small-data that relates to facilities, tools, and equipment. Better understand what’s really occurring when it comes to safety leadership, coaching, communications, and near-miss data to overcome obstacles to creating and embracing more positive performance measures that push you beyond unpleasant plateaus. We need to be steeped in making good data choices, so troughing and plateauing occur less often. We should know what to do, drill deeper, and grind harder, so troughs and plateaus can be aggressively pursued and worked through, regularly.
As W. Edwards Deming has stated, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
Get comfortable with your data, evaluate and execute from your data to make efficient interventions that help you work through the troughs and beyond the plateaus.