In this episode, David Provan and Drew Rae examine a 2025 paper published in the Journal of Safety Research — "Signs of safety: An investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics," authored by James Pomeroy and Colin Pilbeam. Drawing on twenty interviews with experienced safety professionals and analyzed through a semiotic lens, the research explores how metrics such as lost time injury frequency rates and total recordable injury rates are used and interpreted within organizations. Despite well-documented statistical and conceptual limitations, these metrics remain dominant indicators of safety performance. The paper asks not whether they work as measures, but what symbolic work they are actually doing inside organizations.
David and Drew unpack six organizational uses of injury metrics — from controlling work and motivating the workforce to self-promotion and risk signaling — before distilling these into four broad symbolic meanings: management control, image management, risk management, and trust in leadership. The episode reveals that injury rates are unstable signs whose meaning shifts depending on context, observer, and organizational culture. Understanding the emotional and symbolic dimensions of these metrics is shown to be essential for any safety professional seeking to challenge, replace, or engage more honestly with the measurement systems that shape how safety is understood and acted upon in their organization.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
Drew Rae: "People are not dumb. These criticisms are fairly easy to understand, and there are so many of them from so many different directions that people know these criticisms and believe some of them. But injury rates still happen. That puzzle needs to be understood."
Drew Rae: "Something could be a bad measure of whether you're actually safe, but a good measure of how your injuries are affecting these other types of risks that you're facing."
Drew Rae: "Safety activities are driven by affect — emotion matters. We do things in safety because we are afraid, or because we are uncertain, because we are anxious. And our safety activities change those emotions."
Drew Rae: "We've now got both pieces of the puzzle. We know that they don't work objectively, and we know that people keep using them because of these symbolic meanings. That's pretty much the full story about injury rates."
David Provan: "Be curious about the meaning that's being ascribed to the injury rates in your own organization."
Resources:
Primary paper discussed: Pomeroy, J. & Pilbeam, C. (2025). Signs of safety: An investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics. Journal of Safety Research. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437525001410
Related papers referenced in the episode:
Rae, A., Provan, D., Weber, D. & Dekker, S. (2018). Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of 'safety' work that does not contribute to operational safety. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Safety-clutter:-the-accumulation-and-persistence-of-Rae-Provan/5bef7afb671b32977f688afbffe328407cf48039
Hayes, J., Slotsvik, T.N., Macrae, C. & Pettersen Gould, K.A. (2023). Tracking the right path: Safety performance indicators as boundary objects in air ambulance services. Safety Science. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753523000814
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
David Provan - cohost [0:00 - 0:59]
You're listening to the Safety of work podcast, episode 136. Today we're asking the question, what is the symbolic purpose of injury rates? Let's get started. Hey, everybody. My name's David Provan and I'm here with Drew Rae and we're from Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examine the evidence surrounding it. So today, Drew, this question is sort of at the intersection of, I guess, symbolic safety activities or social safety activities and measurement, measurement of safety. So we've talked about these, both of these two topics quite a bit on the podcast, but never quite together. Do you want to sort of talk a little bit about where we've spoken about these before?
Drew Rae - cohost [0:59 - 1:45]
Yes. So I went back and tried to find out how many episodes we've talked about measurement in. And I think the answer is kind of most of them, but some specific ones. So way back in episode 25, we talked about reporting systems and why workers don't report everything. We've talked about statistical validity, which I thought was recently, but that's actually way back in episode 55 when we looked at Matthew Hallowell's work on that episode 97, linking injury rates to pay. Episode 104, when we talked generally about measurement problem, that was the measurement measurement paper. And episode 109, we looked at Jan Hayes and her co authors looking at performance indicators as boundary objects between different parts of an organization or different organizations when metrics collide with contracts.
David Provan - cohost [1:45 - 1:55]
I think Drew might have skipped over episode 35. Then when we looked at Helen Lingard's work on leading and lagging indicators in the construction industry as well. So by my count, at least six episodes.
Drew Rae - cohost [1:55 - 2:01]
Yeah, and that's just ones with like metrics in the title. This is something that safety people get hung up on a lot.
David Provan - cohost [2:01 - 2:21]
And so Drew, as a. As an engineer, sort of as part of a. More of a language, humanities and social sciences school, you know, obviously there's the. There's the things we can count aspect to performance, and then the second topic is more around, I guess, the social aspects of safety. And so we've also talked about that a few times on the podcast as well, by the look of it.
Drew Rae - cohost [2:21 - 3:26]
Yes, I'm pretty sure. Episode zero, our pilot, we talked about this a little bit. Episode 22, whether facts or stories are better at persuading people. Episode 23, looking at how safety professionals exert influence. I think from memory that was the work out of UQ episode 50, we did our own paper, the one that gave this podcast its name, talking about safety work versus safety of work. And this is a topic that's then recurred in our own work in the Safety Clutter paper we talked about in episode 80 and. And the take five paper in episode 95. So yeah, new listeners to the podcast are welcome to go back to these mini episodes. But I think the point we're making here is that these are kind of two big themes in safety. There's the very positivist measurement side, how many people are being injured? And then there's the very social side. Are these activities really sort of mechanical and instrumental or are they more about managing our fears and anxieties? And that's why I really love this paper because it basically smashes these two quite different ways of seeing the world right together and says what happens when we look at those numbers not as numbers but as symbols.
David Provan - cohost [3:26 - 4:23]
So if we introduce the paper now and the title of the paper is Signs of an Investigation of How OHS Professionals Interpret Injury Metrics. Our authors are James Pomeroy and Colin Pilbeam. I know James, I guess professionally quite well. Very experienced safety executive across a range of different organizations based in Europe. Also a little bit like myself, a sort of a mid career PhD candidate which is, I guess always produces interesting research when, you know, people who've been doing something for a long time decide that they maybe want to understand it a little bit better. And it appears as though, I guess his co author, Professor Pilbim, is an organizational safety researcher at Cranfield and James's PhD supervisor. So shout out James, thanks for the paper and know you're a listener. So thanks, thanks for the support. Very recent paper, I guess published in 2025 in the journal of Safety Research. Drew and yeah. Anything else you want to add before we dive, dive into this question?
Drew Rae - cohost [4:23 - 4:27]
Oh, just I kind of think of James as the UK version of you.
David Provan - cohost [4:27 - 4:28]
Oh really?
Drew Rae - cohost [4:28 - 4:55]
You know, someone who's actually been up right at that top of organizations, so understands how organizations work from the inside, but is then bringing that insight not as a let me write a book and tell everyone how to do it, but let me actually come back as a researcher and seriously study some of these interesting questions with both the academic integrity and the industry knowledge about how things actually work. So it can be a really powerful combination. Also a very difficult time of life to do a PhD.
David Provan - cohost [4:55 - 4:56]
Yeah, I guess.
Drew Rae - cohost [4:56 - 5:00]
Yeah. I've been following this project for a long time. It's A really interesting project.
David Provan - cohost [5:00 - 6:05]
So there's signs of safety. So an investigation of how OHS professionals interpret injury metrics. So, Drew, we go into the. I guess this paper starts with a bit of background and motivation for the paper, sort of talking about safety indicators, you know, their wide use within organizations, highlighting some of these specific injury metrics that we use, like total recordable injury rate and lost time injury frequency rate, those things that our listeners probably have a lot of experience with. And they sort of talked about how these metrics function as sort of indirect measures of safety, because safety, as we know, is something that is very difficult to observe directly. So we sort of use incidents occurring or not occurring as a bit of a proxy for how safe our organization is. We'll get listeners. We'll get to the critique shortly, just starting from the top. And this idea that these injury metrics have historically become the kind of dominant global indicators of safety performance that we believe that we're able to use to understand safety in our organizations, to benchmark organizations with other organizations and things like that. Drew, anything you want to add to that?
Drew Rae - cohost [6:05 - 6:33]
Just that rather than going away, the paper mentions that increasingly they're being used for new purposes, even like organizations are much more often putting them into investor relations, like reports to the stock exchange and in environmental sustainability or community social goals reporting. So, yeah, we're going to talk about the critiques, but the important thing to know is that these critiques don't seem to be putting a dent in how much injury rates are used.
David Provan - cohost [6:34 - 6:57]
Yeah, so we're using injury rates for safety. Come as no surprise, anyone who's got to episode 136 of the Safety podcast will probably, you know, have a little bit of steam coming out of their ears Right. Right now. So let's, let's talk about these critiques then, then, Drew. So we've got these metrics, we've got their widespread use, we're using them in new and different ways yet. What, what are the criticisms or. Or limitations of injury rates when it comes to safety?
Drew Rae - cohost [6:57 - 8:02]
Okay, so let's start with the big one, which is they don't measure safety. They measure past outcomes, which doesn't actually tell you what your current safety. So at best, they are talking about how safe you used to be. They measure the absence of harm, not the presence of safety. Those might sound like two sides of the same coin, but it's going to be a problem when we get into these next couple of problems, which is harmful events are rare and they're random. And so it's Very hard to get a statistically reliable measure of the absence of something because the numbers are so low. The moment we start using the metrics for anything substantial like contracts or incentives, they become vulnerable to underreporting and manipulation. They tend to capture sometimes some aspects of safety more than others. So that can create a lot of false assurance that you think safety is going well because your injury rate is going down doesn't tell you anything about the risk that you're about to blow up your oil rig and cause the biggest oil spill in human history. And then the final thing they mention is not actually a criticism of injury rates. It's just the fact that any attempt to replace them with generally runs into all of these same problems.
David Provan - cohost [8:03 - 9:03]
And so, Drew, I guess it wasn't really a central theme or aim of this paper to sort of rehash all these criticisms, but it is, you know, the seven or eight points you just mentioned is a pretty good readable sort of summary of, you know, the things that we know as in safety are kind of either limitations or big red flags with using these as a understanding of safety. However, I guess in linking to the social safety aspect, it's this idea that even if we know all of these limitations and we know that safety incident rates don't help us make good decisions about what we're going to do about safety in the future. Before we sort of remove or replace them, we need to understand kind of all of the social sort of aspects of these types of rates. And I think that's where a lot of the attempts to replace them with other indicators or remove them doesn't run into a logical argument about their limitations, but runs into a sort of a, a challenge argument of how are we going to understand safety if we don't use incident rates to understand safety?
Drew Rae - cohost [9:03 - 10:00]
Yeah, I mean, from a purely research and theory point of view, this is like a massive contradiction that needs to be explained because people are not dumb. These criticisms are fairly easy to understand, and there are so many of them from so many different directions that people know these criticisms and believe some of them. But injury rates still happen. That puzzle needs to be understood. And there's no point in just like carping on about the criticisms that doesn't explain their use. In fact, if anything, it creates this surprising question, why are they still used? And, yeah, looking at them as a symbol, I think is a very promising possibility. Because that's something, David, that you and I have uncovered repeatedly in our own work, that a lot of safety activities, when we get down to it, are not justified because they are proven to work. That's not why people like them. That's not why people use them. That's not what they do. They do a different sort of work, which we called social safety work, which James talks about as symbolic.
David Provan - cohost [10:00 - 10:45]
Yeah, that's social safety in our safety of work safety work model was, you know, those things that organizations need to do to feel like they're doing enough for safety. So we know, you know, safety stand down is a great one. I need to do something, and I'm just going to stop all work for a period of time now. That doesn't change any risk, but it makes us feel like we're where maybe acting or reinforcing or recommitting or doing all those things that just make us a little bit less anxious about safety going forward. So, Drew, I had to Google semiotics. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it right, but I had to Google what it was. But do you want to sort of talk a little bit about. You mentioned symbol just then. Do you want to talk a little bit about semiotics as an analytical lens and how it's sort of being used to sort of further understand these rates in social settings?
Drew Rae - cohost [10:46 - 12:40]
Not really, David, because it's not my most favorite theory, and I don't. Sorry to be totally direct. I don't think you really need to get deep into an understanding of semiotics for this particular paper, and I've had that conversation with James before, is that I think this work kind of stands alone, regardless of your theoretical lens. But it's a lens they're using, so we probably should just describe it at least briefly. Basically, it's the idea that whenever you have any sort of sign, and this can be fairly vague, it could just be a physical object, it could be a coin, it could be a sign on the wall. It could be a word. In a language, anything really can be a sign. You've got what the sign actually refers to. So, you know, if it's a stop sign, it refers to the action of stopping. If it's an arrow, it refers to the thing that the arrow is pointed at. Then you've got the represent. I can't pronounce that. The representation, basically the form that the sign takes. So this is, you know, a stop sign is an octagon, red, with white lettering saying stop. So physically, what does this thing actually look like? But then you've got the meaning that comes from that, that the observer or the person looking at the sign or Noticing the sign takes away from it. And so semiotics is sort of like an easy way to get into the fact that these three things are not the same thing, but they are all closely linked. And when people just sort of like, informally or casually approach any sort of sign, they forget that there are these three separate things and they're not the same thing. Because, like, in our mind, the stop sign directly means put on the brakes. We don't sort of like, break it out and say, oh, what is it referring to? What does it show? How am I interpreting that? All of that just happens unconsciously most of the time. But it is helpful sometimes to break it apart, particularly when different signs have different meanings to different people, because that's where these things can become unlinked. And it gets really, really interesting.
David Provan - cohost [12:41 - 12:59]
When you mentioned sort of objects and you mentioned coins and things like that, all I had going around in my head is the Coke bottle from the original Gods Must Be Crazy movie. When the Coke bottle flies out of the airplane and, you know, to the person flying the plane, it's just an empty Coke bottle. To the. To the people on the ground, it's a gift from God type thing with a whole bunch of different meaning attached to it.
Drew Rae - cohost [12:59 - 13:08]
So, yeah, and that's a fantastic example of the meaning assigned by the observer is not the physical object and is not what the object originally referred to.
David Provan - cohost [13:08 - 14:00]
So, I guess, Drew, the research objectives and questions come next. So we're using, I guess, this lens, which for me, layman's, feels a little bit more like a bit of social constructivism, sort of from a worldview type perspective. So the objectives of this research was to really understand sort of firstly, sort of how injury metrics are used and interpreted in organizations. So I think that's the two sides of it. How do you use it, which is, you know, what form do these metrics take and where do they exist inside organizations, or where are they visible inside organizations? And then who's interpreting them and how are they interpreting them? So how are they ascribing that meaning to those injury rates? So two specific questions I think were what uses of injury metrics are reported by safety professionals and what meanings are attributed to these uses? Anything you want to say about design and methodology now then, Drew.
Drew Rae - cohost [14:00 - 14:56]
So methodology to start with, like, those are not semiotics questions, and the methodology is interviews, which doesn't involve looking at the physical representations or where they're situated. So this is why I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the theoretical lens, but also why I think it's actually fairly irrelevant to the usefulness of this paper because what they actually did is, is sit down and have 20 interviews with 20 experienced RHS professionals and ask them about the use and meaning of lost time. Indicate. And I think that in itself is like just really immediately interesting and valuable data. They also did a step further that I wish everyone would do, but people always leave it out is after they'd done the analysis, they went back and had focus groups with those participants to check their own understanding of them. Particularly important in this sort of project where we are talking about ascribing meanings. And those focus groups did actually correct some of the language and interpretation of the original interviews. So, you know, that step proved its own value and important.
David Provan - cohost [14:56 - 15:22]
Yeah, that validity step, I think it sometimes called member checking, where, you know, you get all your data, you make sense of that data, and then you go back to the people and say, hey, this is how I made sense of this. Does this make sense to you? Now that I'm playing it back with obviously broader trends and meaning? And they go, no, no, no, no, that doesn't fit there. Or that's not, you know, you've taken, you made an assumption there. That's not, not the way that I'd see that. So, yeah, that second round is really, really useful here.
Drew Rae - cohost [15:23 - 15:56]
Yep. And I guess the other thing to say about the method, and this is where the semiotics does come in in the analysis is they don't just look at the like immediately like, how did you use the metrics? What did you do? But they sort of go like the next order and say, okay, so what does that mean that the metrics represented. So, you know, if you used the metric to organize work, then it's signifying some form of control. If you used it to set a target, it's indicating a priority. So they sort of like take the first order, what did you do? And then turn it in Turkey. So what does that mean the meaning was of this object?
David Provan - cohost [15:56 - 16:18]
So I guess from those 17 first order concepts you just referred to, then drew sort of analyzed into six themes. Let's talk through those six themes and then we can actually where the paper finally aggregated it up to is sort of four broad meanings of indicators within organizations. So do we. Do you want to start us off with talking about these six organizational uses of injury metrics?
Drew Rae - cohost [16:18 - 16:37]
Yep. Okay. So the first one they broadly call control of work. So this is. The metrics are being used to organize things, to set targets, planning decisions, where you're putting your resources. Those sorts of directly we use the metric, make a decision, do the work differently as a result of it.
David Provan - cohost [16:37 - 17:17]
So I'm going to pick this contractor because they have lower injury rates. I'm going to apply resources over here because they have higher injury rates. It's really saying that actually, no, no, we use these rates to make decisions about the planning and execution of work. And you know, when used in this way, I guess what they also did as part of this was actually understand kind of like what are the, I guess social responses when these injury rates are used or individual responses when they're used in this way. So say they sort of signify management, control, power dynamics, create anxiety amongst managers. You know, if these decisions are being used to make decisions about work, then I'm worried that maybe the wrong decision is going to be made.
Drew Rae - cohost [17:17 - 18:03]
Yeah. And then they give some quotes that really indicate how this like underlying concept comes in. So, you know, under control. They say the indicator directs business planning across the firm. Every decision is driven by numbers and controlled through targets. So that, you know, really gives this concept of control. And then how can I categorize incidents matters to managers? It gives me leverage. So, you know, leverage is a word that signifies your power over other people or the ability to influence other people. And then another quote, managers must answer for their injury numbers. They must report to the managing directors. It is not a pleasant experience. I don't have the context for that one, but they labeled that one as anxiety. So, you know, this is people are afraid of what they're going to have to say about the numbers.
David Provan - cohost [18:03 - 18:07]
That feels like management, control, power dynamics and anxiety all at once.
Drew Rae - cohost [18:07 - 18:07]
Yeah.
David Provan - cohost [18:07 - 18:52]
So the second use. So we've got this control of work, decisions about work. And then we've got this workforce mode of innovation piece which is where we actually go, no, no, we want to get better at safety. And we use these injury metrics as a way of motivating, inspiring, encouraging our organization to sort of get better or stay good. And so we've got bonus schemes, benchmarking recognition programs. And when things are going well, it creates reward and pride and all these positive type interpretations. And when these aren't going well, then there's these negative interpretations like rivalry, envy, suspicion of data manipulation and these things. So use it to motivate, but I guess is probably only likely motivational when things are going a particular way.
Drew Rae - cohost [18:52 - 19:26]
Yeah. The third one is self promotion. So this is slightly different from the reward and recognition. The reward and recognition is more using it for someone else to judge you. This is like using it yourself. So the organization uses it to demonstrate competence and credibility. They put it in corporate communications, they put it into reporting, they use it for recruitment. Some people even like say it's to do with marketing or spin. I think actually the quote was it's become marketing spin to promote the firm. So this is the idea that you're using the metric as like to tell other people that you're good.
David Provan - cohost [19:26 - 19:41]
What we see, I guess in broader industry today is this, this, this idea of greenwashing around the environmental credentials of an organization or effort in an organization. And I think this is the safety equivalent of greenwashing.
Drew Rae - cohost [19:41 - 20:15]
Yeah, although. And this is where like the way they've analysed it is a little bit tricky to get at a lot of these things. The participants seem to be like sometimes positive about and sometimes negative about. And it's not clear like what the metric itself is signalling, whether it is like signalling the positive thing to some people but other people are sceptical of it or if it is actually directly signalling the scepticism or promoting the scepticism. But there's a lot of this, oh, it can signal capability and positive is positivity. But also that's associated with marketing and spin and manipulation.
David Provan - cohost [20:15 - 20:43]
Yeah, I think that's a challenge here. I just did see one thing during the week from an organization that I know well. No, no. That had very serious and significant safety events during the period and had reported to the market. Oh, our, you know, injury rate went, went down and gave safety a big green light and was just kind of silent on, on these other serious, serious events. So you know, I guess, don't let, I guess with these metrics, I think this idea of self promotion don't necessarily let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Drew Rae - cohost [20:43 - 21:15]
Next one is very straightforward. This is safety measurement. That is okay, so they do actually sometimes literally provide that positivist view of indicating how safe the organization is. But interestingly, like the flip side of that one is people didn't say it indicates unsafety. They said using it in that way they see as a sign that the organization is like conceptually immature. So the presentation of the metric to one person says like literally here is the number and the other person says you don't understand the number. So again that's different observers. It signals different things.
David Provan - cohost [21:15 - 22:18]
Yeah, and I think, you know, it's that idea of I'm, we're a safe organization because our injury rate is X. And like you said here, these OHS professionals are saying, if I ever hear someone talking like that then I form the view that they really don't understand safety. And what I would have the challenge I guess with the analysis here is that, you know, the, all of the interview participants were experienced OHS professionals. I think the average experience was like 20 years of experience in safety roles. And I guess judging by the connection with academia, I also form an assumption that, you know, may be fairly well read. So I would have loved to see or maybe it's a follow up study where you could almost repeat the exact same data gathering with a bunch of senior managers or a bunch of frontline workers and just see, you know, where do they see these indicators used inside the organization? What meaning do they kind of ascribe? What uses and meaning does it, does it have for different stakeholder groups? Because I think this is one, the safety measurement one is one that you would have genuine leaders going, oh my goodness, they've got a score of one, they're really safe, they're really good.
Drew Rae - cohost [22:18 - 22:47]
Yeah. I do think that like it's often a necessary entry point into this sort of topic to start with the safety professionals. So it's the right first step. And even like here they've captured some of like some of these participants are like absolutely rah, rah lost time indicators indicating safety and managers setting a low target means that they really care about safety. So I do think they've captured a bit of the spectrum there. But I would still have loved to see, yeah, some more of like how else in the organisation do people use these same things?
David Provan - cohost [22:47 - 23:30]
And so Drew, the fifth use is around risk signalling. So this is where we start to use injury metrics to assess, you know, financial, regulatory or reputational risk. So we're starting to draw this correlation between, you know, incidents and a, some kind of assumption or connection with the residual risk inside an organization around safety. And this idea that higher injury rates trigger higher insurance costs or maybe subject the organization to more regulatory inspections and that again, these, these interpretations can influence reporting practices. If I know that a higher rate is going to lead to higher costs or more visits from the regulator then I, you know, it's in my interest to make these rates lower one way or another.
Drew Rae - cohost [23:30 - 24:23]
Yeah, and David, I think you've talked about this before but also one of my researchers, Tony Willis, found this in his project. Do I mean, Tony, my apologies, I may have actually got the wrong researcher there. I do not, I mean Richard Brown. My apologies to both Tony and Richard, both who did valuable projects. But this is one of the insights of Richard is this translation of safety Risk into other forms of risk sometimes happens very subtly and unconsciously. As numbers move through an organisation, the conversation, like mid sentence, switches from the likelihood of an accident to the reputation risk to the organisation or the insurance premiums changing. And it's like the washing of one type of risk into another type of risk. So, yeah, it's very interesting that they sort of like pulled this out as a. Like a step in interpreting the symbol that it starts interpreted one way and then it has this second layer of interpret it as a different type of risk.
David Provan - cohost [24:23 - 24:53]
And maybe as a thought experiment on this, Drew, because we talked about. One of the criticisms is, at best, incident rates tell you how safe an organization has previously been. And I know we're not really talking about fatalities and things like that, but I sometimes use the thought experiment with an organization. You know, would you rather work with a contractor that had, you know, a fatal event three months ago or a contractor that hasn't had a fatal event in the last 10 years? And I can make an argument for why each of those organizations could be safer than the other.
Drew Rae - cohost [24:53 - 24:54]
Yes, absolutely.
David Provan - cohost [24:54 - 24:54]
Agree.
Drew Rae - cohost [24:54 - 25:00]
And quite a different conversation maybe if you talk about a fatal incident than if you talk about high injury rates. Like injury rates.
David Provan - cohost [25:00 - 25:24]
Agree. So number six, I guess, is. I guess so. We've got this first overstep or whatever of saying, oh, injury rates may be equal risk and different types of risk. And then the sixth use is that we use these injury rates for. To demonstrate leadership commitment. So this is the one that you were talking about just then about, you know, we use this for communication to demonstrate our commitment for safety. So do you want to say a little bit about that, Drew?
Drew Rae - cohost [25:24 - 25:49]
I think the best thing I can do is just to give two quotes here. The first one is a low injury rate tells me that leaders are paying attention to safety. They get it. And then the other quote, the leadership team set stretch targets to halve the injury rate in a year. The front line viewed it as delusional. So, yeah, two signs pointing in, like arrows in opposite directions. One is they get safety. And the other is, yeah, they're absolutely
David Provan - cohost [25:49 - 26:04]
kidding just on that. Drew, we did do an episode that we didn't mention up front around stretch targets and stretch goals, when a stretch goal is useful. So maybe if you're interested in whether or not a 50% reduction target for these types of things is a good thing to do, go figure out the episode that we did on stretch goals.
Drew Rae - cohost [26:04 - 26:40]
Yes, absolutely. So, David, those were sort of like the six broad categories of, like, behaviors or actions associated with These metrics, so. And kind of what they symbolise. But they then sort of like brought them together into these broader categories of meanings. You might. I think they actually used the word function a couple of times, which is kind of interesting because sometimes people, like, separate out, like, functional purposes of things and symbolic purposes. From this point of view, basically, the symbolic purpose is also a function. It's something that the symbol is doing. Yeah.
David Provan - cohost [26:40 - 27:20]
I think these are a little bit like, just when we talk about that is there are objectives that we need to do, but then there's also, I guess, the. The signals piece. So I sort of see that, you know, we need to make decisions about work. So if I summarize these four, then we can go into each detail about them. So the four are management control, image management, risk management and trust in leadership. And I guess, you know, management control and managing image. Managing work and managing your image are very functional things that companies need to do. Understanding risk and demonstrating leadership a little bit more, you know, socially constructed. So really curious to hear how you're going to sort of talk through some of these, Drew as well. So do we want to start with management control? Sure.
Drew Rae - cohost [27:20 - 27:56]
So this is kind of the. Brings together a couple of different ideas. One of them is more about the very like, technical view of safety that you're going to make decisions based on. Based on how these numbers plan out. But it's also got the other side of it, which is that you can shape decisions by how these numbers are set as targets or reported or even by the like, category decisions you make about an injury falls into one or the other. So. Yeah, but all of that is still in that space of, you know, these are very much tools of direct influence about how the organization behaves.
David Provan - cohost [27:56 - 28:13]
Yeah. So I like those, you know, controlling work and setting targets and monitoring performance. So this idea that, you know, injury metrics really function as tools that. For monitoring the behavior of our people and enforcing accountability for safety in the organization. Right. So, you know, management control.
Drew Rae - cohost [28:13 - 28:46]
Yeah. And most of those, like, the symbolic purpose lines up very directly with the literal purpose. You don't really need to think of them as symbols in order to draw that conclusion. But then the second one is about image management. And this is very much where you start to realize that actually it's not really about the numbers, it's about the construction of legitimacy or positive reputation or we're the good guys or we're good at this. Yeah. The metrics are very much about both that story and that sign and that way of showing the world who we are in particular ways.
David Provan - cohost [28:46 - 29:17]
And companies have regulators, shareholders, boards. If you're a contractor, you've got customers. If you're an operator and you want to get access to certain countries and certain approvals, you know, you have to be able to tell a story about your ability to manage safety. And so metrics clearly help organizations sort of construct these narratives around, you know, who they are, how good they are, their reputation, their legitimacy to these external audiences who really have no idea about how safe that organization is.
Drew Rae - cohost [29:17 - 29:37]
Yep. And they actually call out our own work saying that this is like a form of demonstrated safety, that it's providing that assurance to the external stakeholders, showing that we're meeting our obligations, we're good corporate citizens. I can't remember if they act, they mentioned this paper. But even like the act of transparency can itself be seen as like, we're a good citizen because we're willing to share our data.
David Provan - cohost [29:37 - 29:56]
So, Drew, the third broad theme is this idea of risk management so that we, these metrics help us better. I guess it's got signal here, but, you know, maybe understand our financial regulatory, operational risks. So the metrics are a bit of a proxy for where we might have issues as an organization.
Drew Rae - cohost [29:56 - 30:24]
Yep, they make a kind of really interesting, almost a rhetorical move in the paper here. But I think it's a legitimate point that they're making that they say, okay, we know that this is not actually a good measure of risk, but it is actually a good measure of those other types of risk. So because other people believe in it, it is a good measure of your reputational risk or your financial risk. So something could be a bad measure of whether you're actually safe, but a good measure of how are your injuries affecting these other types of risks that you're facing.
David Provan - cohost [30:24 - 30:57]
I think that's actually a good point and valid point, Drew, because when I outside of operational risk, definitely financial risk, regulatory risk and those things, it is really outcomes that determine that insurance cost is really about industry claims history and things like that. So I think what these things are measuring, if they're measuring kind of like real tangible safety impacts in an organization, then they probably do have a relationship with those other broader, more externally dependent kind of risk, but not, I guess, operational and safety risk internal to a company.
Drew Rae - cohost [30:57 - 31:16]
And then the final one is coming back to this idea of commitment, although this one was like very much a double edged sword that it was seen either like positively or negatively as a sign of commitment. Not depending on the size of the indicator or the size of the target, but really about the validity that the participants placed on focusing on injury rates in the first place.
David Provan - cohost [31:16 - 31:38]
I think part of it's that idea that if I'm going to measure profit and I'm going to measure productivity and I'm going to measure all of these costs and all these other things, then I put a safety measure alongside those things to show that we're as committed to safety as we are to these. To these other things. So it sort of helps virtue signal around. Around safety.
Drew Rae - cohost [31:38 - 32:51]
Yeah. A couple of really interesting things that I noticed here, David, or at least I found them interesting. The first one is that what actually matters really, as to whether using metrics as a commitment is effective or not, isn't actually whether they're a good metric or not. What matters is alignment between the leadership commitment and what people believe. So if everyone in your organization believes in vision zero, then management commitment to zero actually works as a commitment. And people say, yes, management is commitment to zero. Whereas if the management believes in zero and the workers distrust zero, that misalignment leads to real cynicism. And it doesn't actually matter who's right. It just matters that you agree either vision makes sense or it doesn't make sense. It's the disagreement that actually seems to cause a lot of the cynicism and difficulty in getting the signals right here. The other thing is the number of times the word objective shows up in the text and coming directly from the participants. So it's this feeling that injury rates are objective seems to give it a lot of its positive signaling power. And it's. When there's the understanding that in fact it's not objective, that it is manipulable. That's where the cynicism comes from. So, like, people who believe in it is because it feels objective and because they think it's objective.
David Provan - cohost [32:52 - 33:29]
And I think with the type of rates that we use, like recordable injuries and lost time injuries, I think people feel their objective because they say, did the person go to a doctor or not go to a doctor? Did the person lose a shift of work or not lose a shift of work? And, you know, we feel very much like, well, that's really clearly black and white, right? Like, that's one or the other. But yeah, I think that's, that's, that is a narrative that we, we can hold. Whereas we go, no, no, we're doing all the, all the definitions are made up by people. All the classification and categorization is, is made up by people. And, you know, I've never really seen any objective black and white system for anything to do with safety.
Drew Rae - cohost [33:29 - 33:58]
No. And that's how I would have liked the study to go into the actual representations. Because I think a lot of it is we put these on graphs and we show them as like continuous graphs, not as error bars and we put like three decimal points after them. I think those sorts of things really do a lot of signalling of objectivity, which leads to some of these powers as other signals that if we were to represent them in different ways, maybe they would actually not signal the objectivity and therefore not signal the other stuff so badly.
David Provan - cohost [33:58 - 34:15]
So the paper comes back around, before we get to practical takeaways, the paper comes back around to this semiotic interpretation of injury metrics and different types of signs and interpretants. So do you want to sort of talk a little bit about how that, I guess, conclusion on semiotics and then we'll just jump into the practical takeaways.
Drew Rae - cohost [34:15 - 35:16]
I don't have a lot to say here except that they do sort of like say that there are different types of signs here. Some of them are much more linked to the original object, or at least believed to be linked to the original object. So like this is the idea that these are like indexes. They are pointing very squarely to something else that you could check that's real. And then some of them have a lot more social interpretation and context built into them. So you could like literally believe that your injury rate is going to affect your insurance rates. That's fairly direct. But as a symbol of leadership commitment, that requires a lot more social interpretation and layers for the meaning to even be totally inverted between the symbol and the interpretation. So I thought that's really interesting. And just this idea that some of these other purposes, the non indexing purposes, are so unstable in that they're so dependent on context. As you said before, David, like safety education could actually entirely flip your interpretation of why someone is using the symbol and what it says about them.
David Provan - cohost [35:17 - 36:19]
And then Drew, I guess for the interpretations that occur at different levels. So when, when confronted, but I say confronted when, when, when looking at a safety indicator in an organization, they sort of talk about these logical interpretations. So this is like, okay, what am I looking at and what does it mean in relation to safety or risk? Then there's kind of like the emotional interpretation is what am I feeling right now? Fear, pride, anxiety, you know, what, what are those emotions? And then, you know, the third thing is when I'm looking at this is the energetic interpretation. So what am I going to do? What actions, actions am I going to take in response. And I kind of like that framework a little bit because it sort of show breaks down. You know, when I look at an injury rate, you know, I'm basically interpreting an understanding of safety, a feeling, and then obviously decision about action. And when we're constructing narratives around performance, I actually wouldn't mind seeing companies report. This is what we think this means, this is how we think we should feel, and this is what we should do. Might add a bit of meaning to what you're talking about.
Drew Rae - cohost [36:20 - 36:32]
I'm just struggling to imagine someone saying, like, the injury rate is going down as a result, we're feeling really unsure and uncertain about the quality of our reporting systems. Therefore, what we're going to do is manipulate the data to make it look
David Provan - cohost [36:32 - 36:44]
better, make yourselves feel better. So, you know, in this loop of action, I guess, Drew, you are someone who is known for saying something along the lines of all safety activity is just anxiety reduction activity.
Drew Rae - cohost [36:45 - 37:35]
Yeah. And that's not just a rhetorical line. And that is something that I think is one of the findings they have here that is important, which is safety activities are driven by affect, like emotion matters. We do things in safety because we are afraid or because we are uncertain, because we are anxious. And our safety activities change those emotions. They make us more anxious or they make us less anxious, or they make us anxious about different things, or they make us feel reassured. And the more we just treat them as like literal, mechanical things that either work or don't work, the more we forget that those emotions are important data. And so this is why work like this is both important and just the start. You know, it tells us that the emotions matter, but it also tells us we really need to study these emotions more and understand what people do feel when things are reported in different ways.
David Provan - cohost [37:35 - 38:21]
And I guess if you want to try to understand that difference between effect and affect or something, you know, one example from a. I guess the, the clutter work is something like safety audits. Jury is kind of like you say, you tell a company something like, do you want to have an audit program or not have an audit program? And we get a lot to that effect, which is like, how would I. How comfortable would I feel by not having any audits in my. In my company? And then produce a list of, well, here's the last two years of audits, and here is a full list of all of the actions that have come out of those two years. And here's the 95% of these actions which had no meaningful effect on the level of Safety in the company. You can start to kind of show how things that make us feel very safe get kind of conflated with the things where we think are actually making us safer.
Drew Rae - cohost [38:21 - 38:56]
Yeah, and I think it's really important in understanding too, things like big concepts in safety like safety one and safety two, that often people will move to new ways of thinking as a way of feeling better about their work. But actually, often those things actually drive up anxiety for other people in the organisation and that creates a non positive response. And so, yeah, we really do need to think about not just what mechanical work do we do or what information does it create, but how does it affect the emotions and the interpretations. And of course, that's a loop. The emotions affect how we interpret other things as well.
David Provan - cohost [38:56 - 38:59]
So, Drew, is there anything else you want to say before we do some practical takeaways?
Drew Rae - cohost [39:00 - 39:59]
No, I'd be ready to go on to takeaways. The authors themselves do say that there are some managerial implication. Mostly that's just around being aware that these things are actually sources of power and influence and managing relations. And so we just need to be conscious that they're not just raw measurements, that they have these other functions. And if we're not keeping track of those other functions, then we can have lots of unintended consequences. So when we're like looking at a metric, we shouldn't just ask, is it statistically valid? We should look at things like, how does it change behavior? How does it change how people feel? How does it change our reputation? But the big one for me was I think this is one of those more important papers for safety researchers. Like, I think any safety researcher should look at this paper and think, okay, where could my work intersect with this? Because I reckon there's a project intersecting this paper and almost anything else you're working on in safety at the moment that says, ok, here's an angle that might actually shed light, give some new interesting solutions if we start looking at things from other angles.
David Provan - cohost [39:59 - 40:01]
Drew, do you want to keep going? Yep.
Drew Rae - cohost [40:01 - 40:03]
David doesn't want to take ownership of any of these.
David Provan - cohost [40:03 - 40:40]
I've got the next one, but I just. I think. Absolutely right. I think where we started with social safety and where we've seen organizations really struggle to make progress on safety clutter, when we think of the of safety activities as purely instrumental and therefore useful or not useful. And I think, Drew, you mentioned at the start, episode 95, you know, should we can the cards around take five? Right. And I think these are all examples of, you know, it's. It's the meaning, the assumptions and every. And the emotion that we've wrapped around these things, which is maybe more compelling than the actual physical impact of these things on risk in our business.
Drew Rae - cohost [40:40 - 41:18]
And then that gets into, okay, so how should management practitioners take away this work? It doesn't give you easy answers, but it does tell you to just remember that a lot of the work that you're doing is symbolic. And if you're aware of that, then at least you can be conscious and deliberate about what symbols are you using? How are other people interpreting those symbols? I'm not saying that everyone, to be a good safety manager, has to have a book on semiotics on your shelf, but just go and have a look at the signs in your office or the signs you're putting up in the workplace and step back from the raw message about good for safety and look at, like, what symbols are you using? What is that saying? How is that being interpreted by other people? Is it the message you intended to send, or is it the message they're receiving?
David Provan - cohost [41:18 - 42:23]
And I think I'm building on that. Drew. What I took out, I guess in reading the paper is just this warning around attribution bias, right? These rates are not directly attributable to any other variable that we might want to ascribe a connection with. So a story for me is I heard a leader say to me once that this part of the business had the highest injury rates in the company because members of the management team rode motorcycles. And clearly the leaders had a high risk appetite, therefore they had a high injury rate in their business. So I guess as safety professionals and practitioners moving around business, anytime we hear someone saying that our incident rates mean this aspect of safety management, we implemented a new management system and our incident rates have gone down, and that's what caused it. So just don't do that like where you started at the start. Drew, Just the only thing we should talk about with incident rates is these are the things that have been reported as having happened in the last period, right? That's kind of the end of the meaning, the end of the instrumental meaning that we can ascribe to incident rates.
Drew Rae - cohost [42:23 - 43:05]
And that's kind of related to my final takeaway as well, which is if you want to show that something is complete pseudoscience, it's often not enough to show just that it doesn't work. You've also got to explain why people use it anyway, because once you've got that two explanation, like, this is why it doesn't work, and this is why people still believe in it. And if you can explain both of those things, then you've got the explanation for a myth or a ritual or a bad practice that is like a robust explanation. And that's what we have here, is we've now got both pieces of the puzzle. We know that they don't work objectively, and we know that people keep using them because of these symbolic meanings. That's pretty much the full story about injury rates. The question now is, what do we do with that knowledge?
David Provan - cohost [43:05 - 43:34]
Yeah. And Drew, I think another episode I'm reminded of is, you know, can we use substitution as a method of decluttering from the healthcare paper? Because, you know, we've actually got. If we. We're talking about change in groups of people. Right. So we've got to understand what meaning people are putting around these things, and it might be different to what we think what meaning we put around these things as safety professionals, who I guess are the majority of our listeners. So, Drew, I guess the question that we asked this week was, what is the symbolic purpose of injury rates?
Drew Rae - cohost [43:34 - 43:50]
And yeah, they've got a multiplicity of unstable and contradictory meanings depending on who's talking about them, where they're talking about, and how they're being received by different listeners. That's not a straightforward, simple answer, but, yeah, it's a short answer.
David Provan - cohost [43:50 - 44:09]
Yeah. So be curious about the meaning that's being ascribed to the injury rates in your own organization. So that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us for a conversation on LinkedIn or send any comments, questions, or ideas for Future episodes to feedbackafetyofwork.com.