Understanding and Applying Health and Safety Metrics

Construction organizations routinely measure their workplace health and safety performance, using a variety of different measurement methods and metrics. This chapter reviews commonly used health and safety performance metrics. It presents analysis of data collected at a five‐year construction project showing the complex relationships between lag and lead indicators over time. Many construction organizations have begun using safety climate surveys to understand the state of safety in the work environment. Despite the popularity and potential usefulness of measuring safety climate, there are a number of important considerations in applying, interpreting, and using safety climate data collected in construction organizations. The chapter discusses these considerations and their implications for the design of safety climate assessment instruments and conduct of safety climate surveys. It also presents an example to illustrate the use of the hierarchy of controls‐based measurement method for evaluating the effectiveness of proposed design changes to control work health and safety risks during excavation work.