Rancho Mesa's Alyssa Burley and Vice President of the Landscape Group Drew Garcia talk about safety program leading indicators.

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Director/Host: ⁠Alyssa Burley⁠

Guest: ⁠Drew Garcia⁠

Editor/Producer: Megan Lockhart

Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “News Room News” by Spence

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Transcript

[Introduction Music]

Alyssa Burley: Hi! This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa’s Media Communications and Client Services Department. Thank you for listening to today’s top Rancho Mesa news brought to you by our safety and risk management network, StudioOne™. Welcome back, everyone. My guest is Drew Garcia, Vice President and Landscape Group Leader with Rancho Mesa. Today, we're going to talk about safety program leading indicators. Drew, thank you for joining me on today's podcast.

Drew Garcia: Alyssa, thanks for having me.

AB: Of course. So in previous episodes, we've talked about lagging indicators on our KPI dashboard, and those are really the data that shows safety trends after the fact, like how employee injuries will affect the experience mod. But today, I want to discuss leading indicators. So these are things that could lead to an incident that we can identify prior to actually an incident happening in hopes of preventing that accident or employee injury altogether. So what information are most companies using to measure their safety and how can they improve using leading indicators?

DG: Yeah, like you mentioned, most businesses are using lagging information. So this would be either claim activity or incidents from the past and they're using that to manage their safety program. And typically that's the easiest information to get because you're either annually submitting your OSHA rates. So you're looking at the past injury trends and you're submitting that each year to OSHA or with the experienced mod, you're reviewing your experience mod worksheet and you're looking at claim information from as far back, sometimes as four years. And then with Rancho Mesa, we have the KPI dashboard, which is important because it's, you know, bringing insights into the experience mod and how that can be managed and also providing that industry benchmark report. But again, we're using past data to kind of show you where you are and for a business to really take their safety program to the next level and try to impact those numbers, they can switch to also including leading indicators. And in an article I read from OSHA, they suggest using the S.M.A.R.T- which is an acronym for specific, measurable, accountable, relevant and timely goal setting- so that you're using those acronyms to set your leading indicator goals so that you have better information that your business can consistently track. And then ultimately make changes to before the injury occurs, before the accident happens.

AB: Yeah, and I like the S.M.A.R.T. acronym. All of those are really great things to be looking at. So how are you seeing companies capture leading indicators? Because it seems like that might be a little more challenging.

DG: Yeah, exactly. So I think we look at it right now and you say, why aren't most businesses using the leading indicators? And it's for this exact reason is it's really hard to manage and to stay on top of. So probably most businesses were using some kind of an Excel spreadsheet for reporting, you know, where they're using a master Excel sheet and they're establishing their leading indicators and now they are having to input that information. Maybe at the end of the day, based on paper forms that they're getting back from people, and that can be tedious. So that's probably a deterrent and why a lot of businesses aren't looking at leading indicators. So it's exciting for us and really when we were starting this initiative with SafetyOne™ and really trying to make this mobile app the best for our customers, we knew that leading Indicators was a piece that we wanted to bring to the table and really make it easy for our customers to start a program like this. And now through SafetyOne™, it doesn't matter if you're capturing that information at the yard with, you know, like a training or something that you're documenting, or if you have an employee who's out on the jobsite and you want them to perform two or three job hazard analyses a week. They can now grab that information and it could all get reported back to your desktop version of a SafetyOne™, which makes administering a leading indicator program much more practical.

AB: Absolutely. And what's really nice is that the data is real time. So the administrator’s looking at the website, they get that data as soon as it's added through the mobile app. So it's all real time data. So what are some of the real world examples of leading indicators?

DG: So I think what a business can do is look at a couple of things. And one suggestion that OSHA had kind of off the top was using safety meetings, and that could be a number of different types of safety meetings. So you're going to have your tailgates, which are typically, you know, once a week or once every two weeks, and then you're going to have maybe some more formal training that happens either monthly or quarterly, where you're hitting higher level topics that everybody absolutely needs to be there for. And then you might have an annual training day where you're training people on equipment or some kind of safety onboarding. So you've got a number of different safety meetings that you can you can track as a leading indicator. But it'd be important to put in attendance rate to those safety meetings. So now you have that measurable and relevant information that you can benchmark, you know, where you're at. So like for example, on the tailgate meeting, it's not practical to think that 100% of employees are going to be there every Monday. You're going to have somebody that's on vacation, somebody that's going to be sick. So maybe setting that attendance rate to 97% is much more achievable. And that's something that the group can try to, you know, garner their attendance rates towards versus when you're looking at doing a heat illness training, you absolutely want to make sure everybody gets that training. You know, how often you're looking to do it and that might be 100%. So then now you're not just saying we're going to do heat illness training or we're going to have a safety tailgate topic every Monday, you're now saying, yeah, we're going to do that. These are the attendance goals that we're shooting for. So now you have that metric that you're bringing it to the table. The other you know, the other stuff is just looking at the know industry common issues or, you know, trends that are within your industry and OSHA is another a great resource. So you can go on to OSHA's website and you can look at the top type of work related injuries for your industry. And so if you think about landscape tree care/lawn care: heat stress, vehicle accidents, slips, trips, falls, lifting, cuts in hand, hand injuries. Those would be examples of common industry injuries that that occur. So now you can base your leading indicators off of some known industry hazards and you can either benchmark that data with, you know, safety meetings and attendance rates or you can do number of job hazards or trainings for drivers or job hazard analysis for pre work shifts to make sure that grounds are clear to try to avoid those slips, trips and falls. Lifting. You could try to have a number of employees that are performing the Mobility and Stretch program on a weekly basis. So kind of looking at your industry or maybe some of the injuries you've had in the past and then turning that into a leading indicator would be a great guide.

AB: Yeah, and I like the fact that you can break out each of these different topics and assign a specific percentage of, we need this percentage of employees to complete this training, or maybe we need 100%. We need everyone to be trained in these different areas. So can the S.M.A.R.T. principles be applied to other types of losses?

DG: Yep, absolutely. So when you look at other common industry trends for landscape/lawn care industry, we see a lot of equipment theft. You'll see some third party slip and falls that can happen at properties and that's going to pull in general liability. And then obviously vehicle accidents, either at fault or not at fault, that's a big exposure. There's so many vehicles out on the road for these businesses that we insure so they can set up some S.M.A.R.T. safety principles to attack some leading indicators that correspond to those categories. And now we're kind of totally encompassing a safety program that involves not only trying to minimize work related injuries, but also minimizing the other liabilities and protecting the assets of the company outside of the, you know, work side.

AB: Yeah, and I think if we use the term risk management that really encompasses everything, both the injuries that an employee might have, plus any losses of equipment and things like that. So, Drew, if listeners have questions about their leading indicators, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

DG: Easiest way is send me an email and my email is drewgarcia@ranchomesa.com.

[Outro Music]

AB: Drew, thank you for joining me in StudioOne™.

DG: Alyssa, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

AB: This is Alyssa Burley with Rancho Mesa. Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne™. For more information, visit us at ranchomesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.