If your safety metrics only tell you that someone has already been hurt, they won’t help you prevent the next incident you never saw coming. They’re just confirming the impact of what has already gone wrong.
For nearly two decades, I’ve worked across mining, energy, manufacturing, logistics, and construction, helping organizations understand the difference between measuring harm and building systems that prevent it. That distinction is at the heart of what I focus on every day as Safety Director for McGough’s Advanced Technologies Sector, and it reflects the kind of forward-looking safety approach that McGough is committed to applying as we take on increasingly complex work across the country.
In a recent presentation at the Voluntary Protection Programs Participants’ Association (VPPPA) Safety+ Symposium, I had the opportunity to outline the importance of predictive safety in construction, steps firms can take to move forward, and traps to avoid. I believe that as more firms adopt this approach, we as an industry can continue to protect the well-being of our people and the reputation and success of our clients.
The Limits of Lagging Indicators
The construction industry has long relied on Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), Days Away, Restricted or Transferred (DART), and Experience Modification Rate (EMR) to assess safety performance. These are lagging indicators: They tell us what has already occurred in terms of incidents, injuries and losses. By the time those numbers trend in the wrong direction, people may have already been injured and projects affected.
That does not mean lagging indicators lack value. They provide an objective, consistently defined view of past performance and can help identify areas for improvement. The issue is timing: Any improvement prompted by an incident is necessarily reactive, and the cost of that knowledge is significant.
This has led many organizations to add proactive activities that can inspire action ahead of incidents, including toolbox talks, safety suggestions, and near-miss reports. Even here, however, those activities can fall into what I call the “tally trap:” organizations count what they’re doing without measuring whether it’s working.
Consider the difference between these two approaches in a construction context:
- Tally: How many toolbox talks did we conduct this month?
- Quality leading indicator: In how many of those talks did a worker identify a hazard that hadn’t previously been discussed?
The first tells you something happened. The second tells you whether it mattered.
Importantly, a true leading indicator doesn’t stand alone. It creates a chain: an insight leads to an action, that action feeding into measurable improvement. If a metric dead-ends without driving anything forward, it’s just a number.
The Case for Leading Indicators: A Broader Shift
The value of tracking predictive safety indicators isn’t a new idea. Over time, organizations in high-risk sectors like oil and gas, manufacturing, and others recognized that measuring near misses, process compliance, and leadership engagement rather than incidents alone produced better outcomes including fewer injuries, stronger operational discipline, and measurable business benefits.
Construction, as an industry, has come to recognize the value of this approach, and firms are at various points along the adoption cycle of making predictive safety part of their culture.
Tracking and responding to near misses is one of the most valuable examples of predictive safety in action. At McGough, we approach near-miss investigations with nearly the same rigor we’d apply to a recordable incident, including root cause analysis, corrective actions, and follow-through.
Simply labeling a contributing factor as “human error” stops the investigation too early. The more valuable questions are: What conditions made this error possible? What safeguard was missing? What can we improve systematically to reduce the likelihood of it happening again?
Continuous Improvement in Predictive Safety
Moving from a reactive to a proactive safety program is a journey. I often hear concerns that a complete transformation in how safety is tracked and measured feels overwhelming and unattainable. My response is that a strong safety culture is built over time and there are practical steps every organization can take to move forward.
I generally group leading indicators into four broad categories, and each can add value:
- Behavioral: Tracking what people do to be proactive about safety, such as offering suggestions and tracking hazard reporting rates.
- Process: Tracking the response to identified potential hazards, such as inspection results and corrective action closure rates.
- Systematic: Building in measurement for complex ongoing safety needs, such as safety training retention over time or near miss reporting and outcomes.
- Cultural: Quantifying leadership field engagement and employee perception of safety culture.
But first, an organization must create an environment where a safety culture can flourish. This is called psychological safety: Everyone needs to feel empowered to speak up without fear of retribution and believe what they do makes a difference and is valued.
Leaders must reinforce that environment through both words and actions. This is why field presence matters as much as policy. Frontline supervisors need more than technical knowledge. They need the communication skills to ask open-ended questions, the discipline to listen more than they direct, and the organizational backing to act on what they learn.
Safety and Business Performance Are the Same Goal
At McGough, safety is not separate from our business strategy — it is fundamental to it. As we have expanded into advanced technology construction and other complex sectors, a strong predictive safety culture directly influences our ability to deliver: it affects insurance outcomes, informs how owners evaluate us, and signals the kind of operational discipline that complex projects demand.
My role is to help McGough continue building systems in which leading indicators provide genuine foresight, near misses prompt meaningful analysis and our teams have the tools and support they need to work safely every day.
The goal is not simply to collect more data. It is to learn sooner and act earlier — before an incident occurs. When we do that, safety measurement becomes what it should be: a tool for protecting people and delivering better work.
Ashley Gill, Safety Director at McGough, pictured speaking at the American Society of Safety Professionals, Region III PDC, at Seaworld, San Antonio, TX.