If you’re only tracking safety incidents after they happen, you’re already too late. Lagging indicators like TRIR and DART reveal where harm occurred, but they don’t show where risk is building.
That’s where leading indicators come in.
Leading indicators shift your focus upstream. They surface early signs of breakdowns, like missed inspections and overdue training, before those issues result in injuries.
In 2025, forward-thinking safety teams won’t need to rely on spreadsheets or manual tracking to spot these signals. Instead, they’ll turn to AI-powered platforms that automatically collect and analyze data from audits, observations, preventive maintenance, and more
These systems uncover subtle but critical trends, like a drop in observation rates or delayed corrective actions, giving teams the insight to act before small problems turn into serious incidents.
In this article, we’ll explore the leading indicators that drive real impact, explain why they work, and show you how to start using them to predict and prevent workplace incidents before they happen.
What Are Leading and Lagging Indicators?
OSHA defines leading indicators as proactive and preventive measures that help you detect and address hazards before an incident occurs. These might include overdue training, missed inspections, or spikes in near-miss reports. They are anything that suggests your controls aren’t working as intended.
Lagging indicators measure past performance. They’re outcome-based, typically tied to injuries, property damage, or environmental releases. Useful for trend analysis and benchmarking, but they can’t drive real-time safety decisions.
| Type | Description | Example |
| Leading Indicators | Conditions, behaviors, or system actions that could prevent incidents | Near-miss reports, safety audits completed, overdue training, and observation rates |
| Lagging Indicators | Outcomes or consequences of past incidents | TRIR, DART, OSHA recordables, lost workdays, and environmental releases |
You need both to understand the full picture. Leading indicators help you find and fix weak points before they cause harm. Lagging indicators confirm whether your controls actually prevented that harm or failed to.
Why Leading Indicators Work
Leading indicators are your system’s early warning signals. They highlight weak spots before those failures turn into recordables. Think of them as the dashboard lights on your safety program: low oil pressure doesn’t mean the engine’s failed, it means you still have time to prevent it.
They tell you:
- Where your critical controls are starting to slip
- Which crews are underreporting
- Where leadership engagement is low
- How your frontlines interact with your processes
This isn’t theoretical. The Campbell Institute reports an average incident reduction rate of 77% among organizations with established leading indicator programs. OSHA and NIOSH also advocate for these metrics, emphasizing their role in catching silent failures, improving safety culture, and reinforcing accountability at all levels.
Digital platforms like Benchmark Gensuite help bring this approach to life. By automating data collection across training, inspections, observations, and more, EHS teams become more efficient in surfacing early warning signals and act on them before incidents occur.
What to Measure: Leading Indicators That Make an Impact
Leading indicators only work if they’re tied to the way work really happens. Tracking generic metrics wastes time and hides risk. Instead, focus on indicators that reflect your site’s actual hazards, task types, and control reliability.
That’s exactly what the ANSI/ASSP Z10 standard promotes: building custom, risk-based metrics that measure whether your safety systems are working, not just whether a form got filled out. If your data isn’t tied to exposure, it won’t help you prevent incidents.
So, what should you measure? That depends on your risk profile, but these eight categories are where high-performing safety teams consistently focus.
1. Safety Training Metrics
Training metrics often get reduced to attendance rates. But in high-risk industries, it’s not about who showed up; it’s about whether they left the training competent to do the work safely.
Key indicators to track:
- Completion of task-specific training tied to high-energy or high-hazard work (e.g., LOTO, confined space, fall protection)
- Overdue or expired certifications by worker, role, or site
- Percentage of post-incident retraining completed within X days
Pro tip: Shift to a competency-based model. Use practical demonstrations, simulations, or quizzes to confirm understanding. OSHA’s training guidance supports this approach, especially for hazardous tasks.
2. Near-Miss Reporting
If you’re not seeing near-miss reports, it doesn’t mean there are none, it means your system isn’t catching them.
Key indicators to track:
- Reports per 100 workers per month
- Ratio of near-miss reports to actual incidents (a higher ratio means you’re catching and reporting issues before they cause harm)
- Days to close corrective actions from near-miss investigations
Note, a rise in reporting is often a positive sign; it shows employees are engaged, and your system encourages learning over blame. To scale this effectively, AI-powered tools can help flag patterns in near-miss data across sites or teams, surface trends that humans might miss and future-proofing your ability to act earlier.
3. Safety Audits and Inspections
A completed audit isn’t helpful if it skips the right areas or leads to no action. Your indicators should measure both execution and response.
Key indicators to track:
- Completion rate of high-risk area inspections
- Percentage of findings closed within targeted timeframes
- Repeat findings rate by location or team
OSHA’s guidelines call for inspections to be both systematic and risk-based, meaning they should prioritize the tasks and environments most likely to contribute to injury.
4. Employee Safety Observations
What people say in surveys matters, but what they do in the field matters more. Safety observations capture how frontline workers actually perform high-risk tasks, whether they’re following procedures, and where behavioral drift is creeping in.
Key indicators to track:
- Ratio of safe vs. at-risk behaviors
- Percentage of at-risk behaviors addressed with coaching
- Observation rates by department and job role
Tag every observation by hazard type (e.g., line of fire, PPE misuse, shortcutting). This helps you identify systemic risks and recurring patterns that aren’t obvious from incident data alone.
AI-powered platforms can enhance this process by detecting trends in observation data across locations or roles. This helps EHS leaders intervene earlier and reinforce the behaviors that drive a stronger safety culture.
5. Preventive Maintenance Completion
Assets don’t fail randomly. Most breakdowns are tied to delayed maintenance, missed inspections, or ignored red flags.
Key indicators to track:
- PM schedule adherence by asset class
- Reactive work orders following missed PMs
- Repeat failure rates on safety-critical equipment
Poor electrical maintenance is a known contributor to arc flash incidents. It’s one of several reasons why preventive maintenance data is a critical leading indicator, especially in utilities, manufacturing, and heavy industry, where energized work is routine.
6. Safety Culture & Engagement
Engagement metrics don’t measure behaviors; they measure belief. Do your employees feel safe speaking up? Do they take ownership for safety, or see it as someone else’s job? These indicators reflect how deeply safety is embedded in your culture.
Key indicators to track:
- Attendance at safety meetings and toolbox talks
- Percentage of employees submitting hazard reports or safety ideas
- Safety perception survey results benchmarked over time
Higher employee engagement is strongly linked to better safety outcomes. If participation is low, you’re not just missing data, you’re missing trust.
7. Digital Tool Usage and Reporting
If you’ve invested in a digital EHS platform, adoption is a sign of whether safety is integrated into daily work or still seen as admin overhead.
Key indicators to track:
- Percentage of reports submitted via mobile vs. paper
- Time lag from event to report entry
- Dashboard usage by supervisor or team lead
High usage rates often correlate with faster response, better data, and higher trust in the safety process. And when AI is embedded into those tools, like auto-alerts, predictive tagging, or trend recognition, it helps teams surface the most important signals faster, reduce noise, and future-proof safety operations.
8. Environmental Monitoring Data
In environments with chemical, thermal, or atmospheric exposures, leading indicators must include sensor-driven data.
Key indicators to track:
- Percentage of shift hours above exposure thresholds (e.g., noise, heat index, VOCs)
- Alarm trends by area and time of day
- Calibration compliance rate for detection equipment
Overlaying this data with job task schedules helps identify high-exposure roles and adjust controls in real time.
Stop Reacting. Start Predicting.
Every incident leaves a trail. The question is whether you’re catching it before it leads to harm. If the data feels overwhelming, start with just one leading indicator. Track it with intent, and use it to guide conversations, audits, and decisions.
When you’re ready to shift from reactive to real-time, Benchmark Gensuite can help. Our AI-powered tools surface patterns, prioritize risk, and give your team the visibility to act—before the next incident happens.
Common Questions About Leading Indicators (FAQ)
Q: How do I pick leading indicators that actually drive down incident rates?
Start by mapping your critical controls to failure points. If a hazard relies on training, inspections, or human behavior to stay controlled, then any lag in those areas is a warning sign. Look for indicators tied to those controls, like overdue training, skipped inspections, or recurring unsafe behaviors. They’ll show you where failure is building up before it becomes recordable.
Q: What’s the best way to validate if my leading indicators are predictive?
Use a simple trend overlay. Line up your leading indicators next to lagging metrics over 3 to 6 months. If you see near-miss reports drop before injuries spike, or inspection delays precede asset failures, you’ve got a predictive relationship. If there’s no pattern, the metric might be noise, or not tied to a real control.
Q: How often should we review and adjust our leading indicators?
Quarterly is a good baseline. But anytime you change processes, introduce new equipment, or roll out safety campaigns, revisit your indicators. They should evolve as your risks change. Stale metrics won’t reflect current exposure.
Q: Should frontline workers help define or review these indicators?
Yes. They see what leaders miss, like which controls are skipped, which forms are ignored, or where workarounds happen. Involving them builds ownership and improves data quality. Plus, engagement itself is a leading indicator of program success.
Q: What if different sites report different levels of near misses or observations?
That’s normal. Reporting culture isn’t uniform, especially across regions or business units. Instead of comparing raw numbers, look at trends over time at each site. Focus on improving consistency and removing barriers to reporting, not punishing low numbers. Tools like Benchmark Gensuite’s benchmarking and analytics dashboards can help visualize these patterns, highlight outliers, and support a more consistent reporting culture across the organization.
Q: Can I track leading indicators without adding more administrative burden?
Yes, but only with automation. Systems like Benchmark Gensuite can auto-track PM completion, training status, or audit closeout timelines, without manual data entry. The key is to integrate leading indicators into daily workflows so they’re part of how people already work.
Q: Is there a risk of tracking too many leading indicators?
Definitely. Too many metrics can bury the signal. Pick 3 to 5 that tie directly to your highest-risk tasks or regulatory priorities. Then refine from there. More indicators don’t equal more safety, they just create more noise.
Q: How do I convince leadership that leading indicators matter if they only focus on injury rates?
Use cost data. Show how early action, like fixing a control gap before it causes a recordable, saves money, downtime, and reputation. Bring real examples from your operations or case studies. Most executives respond better to risk reduction and cost avoidance than to compliance language.
