It seems these signs have grown horns and arisen from hell! We have all seen them, and most of us have had them in our workplaces from time to time. But are they evil? Are they an accurate indicator of injury data manipulation?
Celebrating our successes in safety is IMPORTANT, and there is no better metric to celebrate than an actual reduction in injuries to our team members. However, we must be consistent in how we have achieved these lagging milestones! In other words…
Are we celebrating the product our Safety Management System/Process produced or are we simply celebrating the result(s) without fully understanding how they were achieved?
We MUST NEVER accept data manipulation to achieve a safety milestone – that erodes the SMS’s credibility and kills the culture. So we MUST be confident that incidents are being reported freely and that any incentives are based on the SMS functioning well and NOT SOLELY on end-results.
We need to celebrate the hard work that earned us this bragging right, and we should be CONFIDENT this achievement is a result of that hard work and be very PROUD of it. But any hint of manipulation in that lagging indicator number must be eradicated with swift and severe action, as it is an ethical breach in what management claims to be the most essential element of the business.
I always liked setting monthly incident reporting goals. And yes, this is almost always met with shock and criticism. I start with…
Ten (10) incidents, reported AND investigated each month
I accept any incident in the early days, from near misses to lost-time accidents. I am just trying to create a culture of OPEN reporting, and we will reward those who do so. As time passes and we get confident that we are getting factual reporting and our reporting is trending in the right direction, we will tighten our expectations and require ten near misses and/or first-aid cases each month. Of course, the recordable and Lost-Time cases get reported, but we are trying to INCREASE the reporting of the lesser incidents as that is where a LEARNING CULTURE is created. Identifying RISKS before the severe consequence is realized is KEY to any SMS, and getting reports of 1st aid cases and near misses is GOLD in a well-functioning SMS!
But management will be puzzled as to why we think each department has ten near misses and first-aid each month. They are shocked at this because they have spent most of their careers working in organizations that do not appreciate or respect incident reporting, especially minor incidents and near misses. I spent my career in high-risk industries and do most of my consulting in these high-risk workplaces, and I can assure you that 10/month is a drop in the bucket. We just have to DEFINE what an “incident” is. That may sound simple, but the #1 issue in organizations is that “incident reporting” and “hazard reporting” become comingled, which can dilute our improvement opportunities.
Hazard Reporting is another CRITICAL function in an SMS – in fact, it is the foundational principle of the SMS.
So, without any doubt, the organization must make a dedicated effort to identify hazards in the workplace. And just like I said about DEFINING an incident, a hazard must also be defined. In my SMS, a hazard can be:
- a physical hazard in the workplace,
- unsafe behavior(s), and
- latent organizational failures that allow the physical or behavioral hazard to be in the workplace
An “incident” involves a physical event, regardless of its outcome.
The example I always use is a hose lying across a sidewalk. If someone trips over the hose and falls or even just trips over the hose but does not fall – that is an INCIDENT. If an employee identifies the hose across the walkway BEFORE anyone trips over it, that is a HAZARD IDENTIFICATION. Our efforts must move the organization to emphasize HAZARD IDENTIFICATION, as a lackluster effort in HAZARD ID will open the door to more INCIDENTS. So, as you can see, most workplaces that are immature in their SMS and Hazard ID efforts will have plenty of opportunities for INCIDENT REPORTING. We just need to ensure that we are creating an OPEN and HONEST incident-reporting atmosphere. It may sound odd now, but we would celebrate when all the teams met their goal of 10/month. And yes, the teams will struggle early on, as in most workplaces, this is a 180° shift in what was expected. But once we coached them in identifying incidents AND they see the investigations are genuinely looking to find the causes and NOT blame, AND they see actions being taken to fix the issues that led to the incident, they will begin to see the advantages of their incident reporting.
This is the PROCESS we celebrate when we achieve injury-free milestones. CELEBRATE the hard work that generated that result and be CONFIDENT that the metric was the result of the SMS functioning as designed, with solid employee participation with a lot of ethics and TRUST. There is no more significant culture and trust killer than the manipulation of the injury rate and then the celebration of that manipulated rate! We may never achieve a 100% accurate end result as too many humans are in the mix, but trust me when I tell you that the workforce does not expect 100% accuracy, but they can smell a rat.
So don’t shoot the sign; it’s just the messenger.
