We're sorry, but OSHAcademy doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please turn on JavaScript or install a browser that supports Javascript.

708 OSHA Recordkeeping Basics - Incident Rates
Skip to main content

Incident Rates

Compare Company Performance

It's useful to evaluate your company's injury-and-illness experience over time to compare the company's performance with that of the industry benchmarks (best practices) as a whole. To do that you need to compute your incident rate.

Person using calculator
Measuring activities (leading indicators) is better than measuring incidents (lagging indicators).

Incident rates only measure what happened

Incident rates are lagging indicators that measure the occurrence and frequency of events in the past. They help you identify what happened, but they are not useful in telling you why it happened. Relying solely on incident rates is like driving down the road and looking in the rear-view mirror to stay in your lane. In addition to incident rates, examples of trailing indicators include: workers compensation rates, equipment failure rates, unsafe behavior rates.

Activity rates give clues about why it happened

To improve safety, you must know why incidents are occurring in your workplace. It's more important to analyze leading indicators because they uncover why events happen and they can help predict the occurrence of future events. Leading indicators measure behaviors and activities such as the number of employees trained, the number of hazard reports submitted, employee participation in safety committees, and the number of safety inspections completed. Measuring these activities help to reveal the underlying surface and root causes for injuries and illnesses.

Bottom line: As long as you measure both leading and lagging indicators, you're on the right track.

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.

6-1. To improve safety, it's best to place emphasis on leading indicators because they are better at determining _____.