Neil Pepper MBE writes on the cumulative value of safety reporting across our sector.
Ok so yes, I am a fan of Shakespeare, but I am certain Hamlet never pondered this particular question, whereas I seem to spend almost every moment of my working life discussing this with people.
The cultural barrier here is quite significant. There are oh so many reasons why people don’t take the step of reporting unsafe acts or conditions that are likely to cause injury, amongst the most common that I hear are “well that’s not my job” or “nothing ever changes anyway even if I do report it”.
So it seems we all have our own unique individual threshold when it comes to what we will or won’t report. What you may see as a significant hazard, your work colleague may well regard as completely irrelevant. What makes your hair stand on end when you see it may leave another completely unmoved.
Can we ever hope then to standardise the appreciation of risk or danger in a business with over 20.000 employees? Well, probably not is the answer, but what we can do is actually make it really simple for people to engage on whatever terms they regard as acceptable within their own threshold as a good starting point for improvement.
What we can do is make it absolutely clear that we are agreeable and in fact more than keen to have anything that you might think worthy of reporting, We can break the myth that some things are not worth reporting and others are.
Does my reporting a bag of recycling office waste paper placed in front of a fire exit carry the same weight and significance as my reporting a scaffolder working at 30 metres above ground without clipping his safety harness on? Does one item with greater potential harm have to negate another in this process? Is there a scale of harm in our consciousness that makes us more willing to report what’s behind door one than door two? And if there is, do you apply it equally at home with your loved ones, children or grandchildren? Is an unused seatbelt less of an issue for your passenger than you? Your child or your child’s friend?
I spend lots and lots of time talking this through with people, encouraging them to report anything that they encounter and commonly I am told, “Well if I do what you are asking, I will spend my whole shift just reporting”.
Think about this statement just for a moment, if that is genuinely the case, what does that actually say about the environment we are working in? If you can genuinely report so much stuff at your location that it would take up your whole shift, isn’t that a pretty clear indicator that you are working in a pretty unsafe environment?
By the way, if you do think you can achieve this, have a go, report away, log the whole lot — you may be pleasantly surprised at the reaction it generates. And if you get a really negative reaction, you can always point at this item and ask the person bashing you to make contact!
Another common response I get is “Well we fixed that as soon as we found it, so why do I need to waste time reporting it?” The simple answer here is that if you never report it, it really almost never happened — it floated out into the stardust of the universe as if it never occurred, because the corporate world can only learn from hard evidence.
We can only judge where our problems are or are likely to emerge from if you tell us what’s happening, and yes I get that it may seem a really insignificant item to report that bag of paper in front of a fire door, but what if in fact that’s happening across 30 or so buildings? Could it possibly indicate that we need to train and develop people in their awareness of the dangers of blocking fire doors? Ha! You might be thinking, a bag of paper is no big issue during a fire evacuation, but there is plenty of evidence that shows how a single person tripping in a real fire situation can absolutely be fatal.
If you like to read history, take a look at the government white paper on the tragic events that occurred at Bethnal Green on the night of 3 March 1943, which killed 173 people. Your report in isolation may not look like it’s going to change the world for the better, but each and every one is a small piece in a large and sometimes critical and life-preserving jigsaw.
We would rather have multiple reports of the same item than miss it because people assume someone else has already reported it. There are some really harrowing examples of this where lives have been lost simply because people assumed someone else was dealing with the problem,
All that reporting achieves is the first step in the improvement process. It’s the visit to the doctor that might identify the problem that’s going to knock you down in six months, or the MOT on the car that pre-empts the catastrophic brake failure on the family holiday.
All too often we tend to view reporting as a negative rather than a proactive intervention, a cultural conditioning that regards it as snitching, grassing up my mates, telling tales. Yes, yes I know when it comes to reporting behaviours it’s a whole different ball game, Who is there out there that likes to be told they are doing something wrong?
The reporting of behaviours likely to cause injury or worse are probably the most difficult of all of the reporting you can engage in. The inevitable, often indignant or even aggressive pushback has absolutely put some people off the whole idea for life, I’m quite certain. It takes certain skills and a little emotional intelligence to manage the behavioural aspects but any one who has children will know all about this. And as everyone has been that child themselves, we do all actually have at least some pre-conditioning in the responses we deliver.
What we know for certain, from the 40-odd years of data available since Lord Robens produced his famous report that led to the Health and Safety at Works Act passing into law, is that the more you report, no matter how insignificant it seems, the less we hurt people.
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