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Near Misses

By Josh Williams, Ph.D. For too many organizations, safety is reduced to a scoreboard of recordable rates. Life is good when rates are low. The sky is falling when rates are high. The absurdity comes in when comprehensive root cause analyses are done with recordables like bee stings and tick bites. Employees have to figure out how they could have prevented it. Managers get worried that their numbers will go up and that may put them on the radar screen with executives. What are we doing here? When everything is important, nothing is important. Leaders need to better distinguish between incidents with serious

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Employees may believe reporting minor injuries is a waste of time or that small incidents are just “part of the job.” However, these minor injuries may have the potential for serious ones with other employees. Shining a light on these situations may help prevent serious injuries and fatalities in the future. Strong leaders encourage reporting minor injuries and close calls. To do this successfully, make the process as clear and simple for your specific organization. This includes simple instructions with reporting to supervisors, using apps, or even dropping off physical forms in deposit boxes. Regardless of your system,

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By Emily Wood Many high-risk industries have carefully studied thousands of near miss, accident, and incident reports, finding most were very similar. Investigations found the same causes of error influenced people to make mistakes, and if they changed the date, location and employee names, the same accidents and incidents were seen again and again. This blog speaks to five of the most common preconditions for human error (in no particular order) and identifies some countermeasures various industries have identified to combat such error. The American Institute of Stress found 83% of US workers suffer from work-related stress and US businesses lose $300

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By Eric Michrowski The true implication for an organization that isn’t seeking every opportunity to learn is to accept to operate with a certain level of ignorance. Such comfort with organizational ignorance is one of the biggest barriers to success for businesses and is particularly dangerous when it comes to organizational safety. Companies need to, without compromise, learn from small events, near misses and injuries in order to systematically remove potential risks and reduce SIF potential. This is why leading organizations work to create an environment where workers are comfortable reporting close calls and incidents.  By focusing on using near misses and even

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. Close call reporting is a key piece of a robust safety culture. The term often used in safety circles is “near miss” which is a complete misnomer. George Carlin famously joked that two planes almost hitting each other is actually a near hit and that a near miss would technically be an actual collision (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKdvTecYAM). Tightening up your close call reporting keeps people safe. Organizations with a strong safety culture effectively support reporting near hits to prevent future and more serious reoccurrences. There should be an ongoing, active cycle of reporting close calls, making any system changes for

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By Josh Williams, Ph.D. The Challenge Although workplace incident rates have steadily declined by 28% over the last decade, rates for serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) have remained virtually unchanged.1 Further, organizations often focus on “recordables” without adequately addressing, prioritizing, and communicating about incidents (and close calls) with SIF potential. As an example, someone spraining an ankle falling 20 feet from a telephone line is quite different than the same person doing so stepping out of a truck. Leaders need to reorient their thinking regarding SIFs. Recordables and first-aids should continue to be monitored, addressed, and discussed. However, overemphasizing these metrics does a

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