On Thursday, January 11, 2024, Karlee Rutherford, Senior Group Supervisor at ISN and Katie McLaughlin, Senior HSEQ Team Lead at ISN conducted a live NATE webinar titled “The Importance of Incorporating Leading Indicators”.
The U.S. OSH Act requires employers to provide a safe and healthy workplace free of hazards and despite OSH improvements, increased focus on improving safety culture, and technology improvements, injuries continue to remain a risk in the workplace. Over the last 20+ years, the industry has seen a decline in some historical incident rate metrics such as Total Recordable Incident Rate, yet life-altering injuries and fatalities are still occurring at a steady rate. This industry is shifting focus to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities and to do that effectively, companies must expand the metrics they are measuring to look at leading indicators in addition to traditional lagging metrics like TRIR.
In the telecom industry, to reduce the number of injuries from contractors and employees alike, telecommunications companies have implemented systems to track individual training qualifications to drive accountability, monitor expiration dates, maintain OSHA compliance, and ultimately send workers home safely. Companies are also looking at safety culture and proactive safety management system implementation to have better confidence in future performance.
Through this seminar, there was discussion around the shift to leading indicators within the telecom industry, commonly encountered challenges, and insight into partnerships with ISN and the offerings utilized to select qualified contractors with a proactive safety culture.
