Safety Culture: pro-active reporting

The importance of pro-active reporting is well documented, and companies understand this is an important way of measuring performance as part of the ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act’ cycle. 

All employees need to feel safe at work, that health and safety are top priority and taken seriously.  Although it’s not possible to predict accidents, it is possible to reduce the possibility of an accident happening in the first place and be better prepared to deal with it.

However, increasing the level of reporting is still an area that some companies struggle with. Why don’t some team members engage in the system? How do we categorize near misses, hazards and safety observations? 

One solution that we are seeing employed is to set a simple objective: Every employee to make one pro-active report per year. 

This thrust toward complete engagement of the whole workforce requires managers to understand what blocks some team members have toward reporting. Is it language? Is it time? Is the reporting method too complex or difficult to understand? Does everyone have access to the reporting mechanism and is that access easy? Are line managers explaining pro-active reporting sufficiently and why it is so important? 

Companies that have employed this technique have seen reporting numbers rise and, as importantly, peoples’ daily focus on safety increase. This aspect of people thinking about safety frequently, raising its profile, increasing engagement, is often as important as what is actually being reported (and fixed). 

For a conversation on how we can support you to develop your Health and Safety culture, contact us today.