Safety Effectiveness Indicators (SEIs) : measuring construction industry safety performance

![CDATA[The current application of Positive Performance Indicators (PPIs) in the construction industry largely measures numbers of disparate safety activities. Generally, PPIs are seen by industry stakeholders as not providing generalizable indicators of safety effectiveness. Further, they do not provide consistent data useable by industry to target areas of focus and improvement in safety performance. Notwithstanding efforts by NOHSC since 1994 to encourage the uptake of PPIs, industry at large has rejected these attempts. Yet, currently PPIs are the only ‘lead’ indicators measuring success as opposed to ‘lag’ indicators which, increasingly, since the mid 90s have been criticized as largely measuring failure eg, the raw number of injuries sustained in an organization per year or their frequency obtained by dividing the number of injuries by (a notional) one million hours worked per annum (Lost Time Injury Frequency Rates) (LTIFRs). Another issue that militates against the uptake of PPIs is that for legislative purposes, such as recording and reporting injuries, only LTIs and the like are required under the nine Australian OHS jurisdictions. Generally their format is guided by Australian Standard AS 1885.1-1990, which is non-enforceable at law, but nationally and internationally recognized as an authoritative conformance document. There is no equivalent for PPIs. Another inadequacy common to lead and lag indicators is that neither measure essential leadership attributes, communications and desired safe behaviours as necessary elements of safety culture and safety performance. The Construction Innovation CRC research project on which this paper is based proposes that the measurement of safety effectiveness is a requirement for measuring safe behaviours and safety performance. In other words, as well as requiring positive safety behaviours, these need to be measured according to the positive safety actions they generate. Currently, there are no standard national or international safety effectiveness indicators (SEIs) that are accepted by the construction industry (nor any other industry). The purpose of this research is to explore the applicability of SEIs to the construction industry.]]