USACE Has Leading Indicators. Scoring Them for Quality Is the Next Step.

Federal construction safety measurement has long centered on lagging indicators: Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR), Days Away Restricted or Transfer (DART), and fatality counts. All three metrics appear in monthly reports, dashboard briefings, and contractor performance evaluations across U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) districts. By design, they measure consequences—harm that has occurred, exposure that has happened. Hinze, Thurman, and Wehle, writing in Safety Science (2013), identified lagging indicators as reactive measures that reveal safety failure only after injury occurs, and showed that lagging indicators describe safety outcomes after injury occurrence, while leading indicators measure safety processes that can be improved before injury.

Leading indicators work differently. Hallowell, Hinze, Baud, and Wehle (2013), in the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, framed leading indicators as measurable safety activities that can be monitored and acted on before injuries occur. A systematic review by Xu, Cheung, Manu, and Ejohwomu (Safety Science, 2021) identified 16 construction safety leading indicators, including organizational, operational, cognitive, and behavioral measures. None of those are captured by TRIR, and all of them reflect whether a safety system is functioning—not whether it has failed.

USACE requires most of these measures through Engineering Manual (EM) 385-1-1, the Corps Safety and Occupational Health Requirements manual. Projects must produce site-specific Accident Prevention Plans (APPs), Activity Hazard Analyses (AHAs) for each definable feature of work, training documentation, near-miss reports, periodic inspections, and corrective-action tracking. Each of those requirements functions as a leading indicator. An AHA accepted before work starts reflects whether hazards were identified before exposure. A near-miss report reflects where the safety system came close to failing. Corrective-action closure reflects whether identified risk was managed or allowed to accumulate. OSHA's 2019 guidance on leading indicators describes them as proactive, preventive, and predictive measures that provide information about safety program health before harm occurs, which is an accurate description of EM 385-1-1 compliance when executed well.

Execution quality is where most USACE projects leave performance on the table. On a typical project, the question asked about an AHA is whether it was submitted and accepted. Guo, Yiu, González, and Goh (Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 2017) developed a pressure-state-practice model that links project pressures, site safety conditions, and safety practices as a basis for construction safety leading indicators. An AHA completed under schedule pressure, never reviewed with the crew, and never revised after conditions changed has met a compliance threshold without providing any safety value. Scoring AHA quality—whether it reflects actual field hazards, whether the crew reviewed it before work started, whether it was updated when conditions shifted—converts a paperwork requirement into a genuine leading indicator.

Safety leadership is the variable that determines whether compliance becomes control. Alruqi and Hallowell (Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 2019), in a meta-analysis of construction safety leading indicators, found that safety leadership, safety climate, and management commitment consistently rank among the strongest predictors of safety performance across studies. First-line supervisors are the mechanism through which AHA quality, near-miss reporting culture, observation closure, and corrective-action follow-through either happen or do not. Hallowell, Bhandari, and Alruqi (Construction Management and Economics, 2020) reinforced this by showing that integrated safety prediction—combining leading indicators with risk assessment and safety climate data—outperforms any single metric in isolation. Training completion, one of the most commonly tracked leading indicators, is weak as a standalone measure; competency demonstrated in the field by a crew whose supervisor actively reinforces safe behavior is far stronger.

Attain Leadership Solutions works to build the supervisory and managerial capability behind these systems. Scoring leading indicators for quality is a technical step. Building a culture in which supervisors use AHAs as field tools, crews report near misses without fear, and managers connect schedule pressure to safety risk is a leadership problem—and one that has a solution.