Picture a manufacturing plant with a leaking roof. At first, it’s just a few drops. Employees report it to the organization, but nothing gets done. A forklift driver places a bucket to avoid people slipping on the water that accumulates on the floor or an incident with the forklift, but no one fixes the leak.
Over time, the leak spreads and weakens the ceiling. Then one day, the roof collapses on top of an employee, severely injuring him. Now the HR leader is not managing a leaking report, but a safety incident for not fixing the leak on time. They’re also responsible for coordinating a workers’ compensation claim, responding to a union grievance for not solving a safety risk on time before causing an incident, arranging mental health accommodation for the forklift driver that is traumatized by witnessing the accident and thinking it could have been him, while other employees asked for job accommodations for their job, and on top of that, dealing with the demoralized and decrease performance for other employees that saw the worker leave in an ambulance after the incident.
Now operations must stop while the health and safety team works on the safety inspections and the labor relations team manages the union grievance. The incident reached the national news with the union representative speaking about how the incident could have been avoided, causing severe reputational damage to the organization.
Unfortunately, the signs were always there. The leaking drops falling from the ceiling were a safety risk, which is the incident’s leading compliance, accompanied by safety complaints and reports.
The collapse of the ceiling resulting in an occupational incident, a disability claim, job accommodation requests and the union grievance are all of the lagging compliances. Everything is interconnected. If there’s any issue, the organization faces leading and lagging compliances that are all interconnected.
How could the organization miss the signs? The reality is that this happens when managing health, safety, employee relations and labor relations with fragmented tools or even worse, manually.
Everything is Interconnected
In today’s constantly shifting regulatory environment, everything is interconnected. When organizations overlook these links, they risk safety incidents, grievances and complaints that the employee relations and labor relations have to deal with.
These aftermath events are avoidable consequences that many organizations in highly regulated industries like banking, professional services, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, public sector, oil & gas, utilities and mining, healthcare, higher education, construction, engineering, and transportation face when managing health, safety, employee relations and labor relations without an integrated platform with visibility to the leading and lagging compliances.
The impact is measured in billions. According to the National Safety Council, in 2023, workplace injuries cost employers in the U.S. $177 billion. Similarly, grievances which are escalated to arbitration for unionized employees cost organizations approximately $10,000 per case plus the loss of productivity and morale in employees, as reported by SHRM.
Most of these cases are the result of a failure to connect leading indicators with lagging indicators, resulting in costly outcomes. This is where Sodales changes everything for unionized and non-unionized organizations managing these complex and highly regulated processes.
The Critical Link Between Leading and Lagging Indicators
When organizations are tracking data from safety reports, complaints, inspections and grievances, this data usually comes from isolated systems. However, this data is part of a single, interconnected cause-and-effect chain that signals what could potentially go wrong in a work environment. These leading indicators can be:
- Job Accommodations requests
- Near-misses
- Hazard reports
- Risk observations
- Employee complaints
- Workplace incident/accident
- Disciplinary records
- Missed trainings
- Inspection findings
- Employee grievances
- Etc.
These are the drips before the collapse that signal that the roof is weakening. A hazard report today could be a disability claim tomorrow. A complaint about unsafe conditions could be the precursor to a costly lawsuit, damaging an organization’s reputation and disrupting operational continuity, an OSHA violation or the start of a grievance or a union arbitration for better safety measures. A declined disability case can lead to legal escalations for not following the contract policies or union arbitrations due to breaches of collective agreements.
While these alarm HR leaders, there are no negative outcomes yet. Lagging indicators are reactive outcomes that confirm something went wrong if the organizations miss the signals coming from leading indicators. The lagging indicators are:
- Other workplace incidents
- Occupational disabilities
- Union arbitration cases
- OSHA violations
- Grievances
- Complaints
- Disability claims
- More inspections
- Etc.
These are the aftermaths after the ceiling collapses.
According to the CDC, organizations that systematically track and act on leading indicators present a stronger safety culture and have up to 52% fewer injuries as a result. However, only 20% of large enterprises currently use a dedicated compliance platform for health, safety, employee relations and labor relations.
Without connecting leading and lagging indicators, HR leaders, safety, employee relations and labor relations teams are mostly responding to crises instead of preventing them. But there is a solution to this, Sodales.
This is the reason why when a workplace incident happens, it usually goes from zero to 100. Because the organization is not prepared to prevent and must respond to the crises that build up as they continue to get the lagging compliances of an incident.
The Sodales Difference: One Platform, One Chain of Insights
Sodales has enabled organizations with a tremendous opportunity to streamline many disparate compliance functions on a single platform with a compliance map.
Sodales solves one of the main preventive challenges for organizations: Interconnecting data from all compliances as leading and lagging indicators, enabling cross-functional communication and collaboration. Sodales brings compliance processes together across different departments along the management process. It collects real-time data across health, safety, employee relations and labor relations, facilitating cross-functional communication while improving productivity, performance and cost.
This approach allows organizations to have full visibility and connect all the dots across key indicators such as incidents, disabilities, inspections, complaints, grievances, risks and more.
How it works:
When a leading indicator is logged, a near-miss on a manufacturing floor, for example or a complaint about unsafe equipment, Sodales doesn’t just file it away. Our system links this data to all other relevant compliances, such as related hazards, past incidents, complaints, grievances, disciplines, etc. and builds a compliance map.
Just like the leaking roof, Sodales doesn’t treat each drop, like a complaint or a near-miss, as a separate issue. It connects them across departments, revealing the full picture before the ceiling falls in.
It builds a comprehensive risk map and chart with all events linked to other relevant compliances. Then, it triggers notifications to the right stakeholders with automated workflows.
If a lagging indicator follows like an actual injury, Sodales automatically risk values for all other compliances that might get impacted, e.g. Potential to get a:
- Disability
- Employee Complaint
- Union Grievance
- Return-to-work or accommodation requirements
- Audits
- Etc.
This enables organizations to have a holistic view of the compliance process and creates learning opportunities to enforce a preventive method.
Leading and Lagging Indicators for Industry-Specific Impact
Sodales doesn’t just connect all the data, we help organizations to manage compliance efficiently with a focus on employees’ safety while empowering organizations’ health, safety, employee relations and labor relations teams to proactively deal with industry’s most common challenges.
Whether it’s a bank, a professional service company, a remote mining site, a university campus or a public sector organization, the leaking roof analogy applies to all. A missed inspection in oil & gas, a delayed grievance in healthcare or an unresolved complaint in a company are a drip that can lead to collapse if they’re not connected and addressed.
With Sodales leading and lagging indicators approach, we help organizations solve the most common challenges across highly regulated industries.
- Complex and Varied Compliance Requirements
For the oil, gas and mining industry, managing a wide range of certifications and requirements such as OSHA, MSHA, drug testing and health checks across different workforces is a complex logistical challenge that can lead to expensive penalties in case of non-compliance, especially when it comes to login in across remote sites.
Sodales centralizes compliance tracking, reducing the risk of missed certifications with leading indicators such as notifications to the right stakeholders and real-time visibility across locations, plus process automation and access to input information. Also, employees can make offline reports related to OSHA/MSHA to ensure compliance despite the complex and varied requirements.
- Workforce Safety and Risk Mitigation
In manufacturing, HR leaders must create safety initiatives to ensure that hazards are controlled, repetitive motion is performed properly to avoid injuries and machinery is in good condition to use to avoid incidents.
Sodales helps organizations to create a proactive preventive culture connecting leading indicators such as hazards, audits, inspections etc., with outcomes like disability claims and complaints, enabling predictive safety and proactive interventions. With its mobile accessibility, high-risk results from audits can be reported directly from the mobile without Internet access, enforcing a safety culture.
- Skill Gaps
The baby boomers’ generation that is retiring from oil & gas and utilities is creating a talent gap that HR leaders must fill training and hiring new workers who work together with new technology while preserving the know-how of processes.
Sodales integrates employee relations and labor relations with a real-time data view and centralized documentation, collecting key workforce metrics to empower employers in high-risk industries to have knowledge continuity and succession planning, focusing on yielding labor to improve employee retention and higher productivity.
- CBA and Contract Compliance
In industries like the public sector and transportation, managing employee grievances requires strict adherence to CBAs (Collective Bargaining Agreements). For organizations with workforces covered by multiple CBAs, this can be a complex process. Ensuring compliance across diverse agreements requires a robust system to track and respond to grievances appropriately.For private companies, such as banks, professional services, and telecommunications, complaint management must align with internal contract policies, employment standards, and regulatory frameworks to ensure compliance and mitigate risk.
Sodales enables organizations to track and resolve complaints and individual, group, or policy grievances. In the public sector, this includes support for union-specific rules and automated processes based on the terms of each Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). For the private sector, Sodales ensures compliance with internal contract policies and employment standards, streamlining complaints management and reducing legal risk.
- HR Risk Management
HR leaders in healthcare and education manage compliance across health, safety and labor relations, facing challenges when manually tracking processes related to Title IX in the U.S. or ADA in Canada through fragmented systems, increasing compliance risks.
Sodales offers end-to-end visibility into compliance with leading indicators across the workflow of different processes across health, safety, employee relations and labor relations to proactive manage risks, track grievances and keep up with the employee relations cases with early interventions on one audit-ready system.
With Sodales, you have an interconnected system that treats every incident as a learning opportunity to feed back into prevention. It’s seamless integration with SAP, Workday, Dayforce, Oracle, UKG and other HR core systems makes it a transformative system to empower your organization to proactively manage health, safety, employee relations and labor relations, fostering a people-first culture where employees’ safety is embedded across the various processes.
Sodales empowers organizations to unify leading and lagging indicators into a single, intelligent platform, transforming compliance from a reactive burden into a preventative advantage that helps reduce costs, strengthen labor relations, and put people first. Your organization can act when the leaking starts, not when the injury happens.
Book a demo today and discover how Sodales can connect your organization’s leading and lagging indicators to transform your processes from managing disjointed events to a connected one, providing a holistic view of the chain of events, fostering a prevention culture.
