Nurturing the Culture of Reporting Incidents

Abstract A high percentage of incidents go unreported or are covered up to avoid negative consequences from the client or management. Due to this a significant amount of learning and opportunity for continual improvement is lost. Reporting incidents without fear of consequences is vital to understand the true causes and therefore prevent incidents and failures. Obstacles, barriers, and external influencing factors prevent reporting of incidents at all levels within the organization. Incidents are reoccurring and we fail to learn! A key barrier identified was that 25% of Managers’ bonuses are linked to Lost Time Injuries (LTI); and consequently there were negative reactions from line management to incidents being reported. Clients did not want to affect their performance and bonus. Supervisors and employees had poor understanding of incidents, and the organization had a poor reporting and investigation system. Addressing the barriers involved the following: delinking the bonus from incidents, modifying the organization’s HSE performance indicators to only take into account the ones with proactive energy, establishing an Incident Review Meeting where all incidents with a high potential are presented by the Division General Manager to the CEO and other General Managers there by creating a sense of ownership. A 24 hours incident notification system was implemented with a distribution list to be sent from the grassroots level. By doing so, the company found that it was now aware of more than 60 incidents per year not previously reported, including about 10 LTIs per year. Just because no negative information is being reported, does not mean it does not exist. This is not limited to incidents but all areas (Non - Conformances, Customer complaints, Equipment failure, etc.) for improvement within an organization. Reporting an incident is a fundamental element of HSE, but if not checked and ensured to be working, a lot of critical information can be lost and injuries will be prevalent.