Preventative Safety Metrics with Highway Maintenance Crews

What gets measured, gets improved. This applies to safety in the construction industry, where the primary measure of safety performance of construction workers is the OSHA recordable incidence rate. While this reactive metric is important to understand the frequency of injuries, it does not assist in managing the safety, health, and overall well-being of construction workers. Therefore, researchers encourage using metrics that assist in indicating a higher likelihood of an injury occurring since such metrics would be more beneficial to improving safety and health. While proactive safety performance indicators have been extensively discussed in the literature of construction research, minimal attention has been paid to using these metrics in the highway construction and maintenance sector. This study addressed this gap by developing a holistic action-ready mechanism to assess safety performance of highway maintenance personnel in Kentucky. Using the analytic hierarchy process analysis (AHP), 5 metrics and 65 leading indicators were selected and weighed to proactively reflect the safety performance of the targeted workforce. The final product of the study is a scorecard used to assess safety performance of Kentucky highway maintenance crews on a district level, an area level, and a program level. This study provides a useful proactive tool that can be used by States DOTs to assess safety performance of their maintenance crews. In addition, the study contributes to the body of knowledge by discussing the use of proactive performance metrics in the highway construction and maintenance sector.