Key Points

• Just-released injury benchmarks from over 1 million officers show where, when, why, and how often harm occurs.
• Near-miss reports can reveal upstream risks without injuries to expand prevention insight.
• Workers who experience a near miss are about 2.5 times more likely to be injured, so capturing and acting on these events can materially improve prevention outcomes.
• Non-reporting can thwart efforts, however, meaning firms must address reporting barriers and clearly communicate the learning value of every near miss.

Getting a complete picture of safety challenges

Injury data is a vital piece of intel for driving better safety outcomes, and the inaugural GSB Pulse issue includes injury benchmarks derived from more than 1 million officers. Knowing where, when, why, and how often injuries occur is foundational to developing effective prevention strategies.

It’s possible, however, to glean insights absent the occurrence of injuries by examining near-miss incidents; events that could have easily resulted in an injury but luckily didn’t. (Think: a hammer falling off scaffolding but the missing people below as it falls to the ground.) Tallying and capturing information about these events offers security firms an additional opportunity to understand risk trends and conduct hazard mitigation.

Scientific studies prove out the value of near-miss injury programs. On average, workers in the survey who experienced a near miss were two and one-half times as likely to experience an injury at work. (The probability of sustaining an injury increases from 10% to 25% for respondents who experience a near miss.) The implication is obvious: If you can capture these events and implement solutions to prevent them from happening, then you’re likely to see better injury prevention results.

There is a catch, however. Poor participation can potentially cause a near-miss data collection effort to mislead prevention efforts.

As safety leaders know, capturing near-miss incidents can be tricky. Consider the sleepy worker whose carelessness causes him to catch his sleeve in a piece of equipment. He escapes unhurt and there are no witnesses, so why, they must surely wonder, does anyone need to know about it?

The reason a worker may not report this event, and the reason you think they may not, could be very different.  

“The use of incident reporting schemes is becoming increasingly widespread…but the extent to which these schemes really capture a representative sample of actual events remains a topic of debate,” according to research on incident reporting bias published Safety Science. The issue is critical: If near-miss systems don't offer a reliable snapshot of incidents, then safety programs that use them to prioritize interventions could potentially be misdirecting injury prevention efforts.

How can firms work toward a more reliable system? One that captures a truly representative sample of injury precursors? In analyzing research, we’ve uncovered some keys for security firms and their clients to consider as they strive for a more accurate near-miss database.

Understand (and address) the entire range of reasons why workers may not report a near miss arising from  mistakes

Employee perception that reporting a mistake will “get me in trouble” is a barrier to near-miss reporting, but it's not the only one, according to published case study. It found that the primary reasons for not reporting mistake-related near misses fell into 6 general categories.

• Afraid/ashamed.  In a company with a blame culture this is a significant obstacle, but a certain level of fear among operators to report their own errors probably exists at all organizations.
• No learning. Workers are less likely to report incidents that they think are “not newsworthy”—or indicative of risks that are widely known—thus minimizing what could be learned by reporting it. For example, workers wrote they didn’t report incidents because: “the check and double check system is already emphasized,” “there is no lesson to be learned,” and “it’s an error frequently made; everybody knows about it.”
• Not applicable. Sometimes workers didn’t report an incident because they felt it was beyond the scope or aim of the reporting scheme. For example, workers said: “It was a communication problem; not a real safety risk;” “It’s not an unsafe situation, just planning,” and “it was an administrative kind of error.”
• Recovery. Workers may also not bother to report if they feel they themselves, through their successful recovery, “took care” of the situation—making it superfluous to report. For example, workers wrote that they didn’t report incidents because “I discovered it in time,” and “because I made and recovered the mistake myself.”
• No remaining consequences. If workers don’t see any remaining consequences, they often see the event as unimportant to report. Workers said they did not report an incident because: “It was an insignificant error;” “the error only has consequences for myself: loss of time;” and “it did not create other problems.”
• Other. This category captures reasons workers don’t report near misses that don’t fit into the other five categories. For example, workers in this test case said they did not report because “I was too busy at the time;” because “I am too new and don’t understand the reporting system;” and because “the alarm system caught the mistake.”

If a firm believes it needs more specific data on why its workers are not reporting incidents, it can try conducting an anonymous survey or using a sample group of workers to keep a diary on near miss reporting habits to get at the answers.

Focus on communication to improve the reliability of your near-miss reporting

The case study highlighted a the existence of a gap between what management thought was driving non-reporting of mistakes (fear, shame, afraid of getting in trouble) and what actually was. More than having personal reasons for not reporting, workers more didn’t report near misses because they didn’t think they were important or didn’t see value to the firm in reporting it. The researchers’ advice: It is critical for an organization to implement a program that clearly communicates its sincere interest in learning about all mistakes. If companies want an accurate near miss database, they cannot allow the employee attitude of “all’s that ends well” to flourish.

Conclusion

The study has some important implications for safety directors at security firms looking to use near misses as upstream intel for injury prevention:

• Even in organizations with a highly functioning safety system, underreporting of near misses caused by employee mistakes frequently occurs.
• There is a wide range of reasons why employees may not report their mistakes, and companies need to make efforts to identify those that may exist at their organization.
• Being able to convince workers to report incidents when the learning value or safety implication of the incident is not readily apparent may be the true test of whether or not a near-miss reporting system paints a true picture of near miss incidents.