Institute of Work Health and Safety / Reporting

How to make a near miss report worth filing

People report when something visibly happens as a result.

Near miss reporting is universally encouraged and unevenly practised, and the difference between sites with high reporting and sites with almost none is rarely the form. It is whether reports visibly produce anything. A worker who reports a hazard and sees it fixed will report again. A worker who reports and hears nothing has learned that the form is a filing exercise, and no amount of encouragement undoes that lesson.

The feedback does not have to be a fix. Often the honest answer is that the issue is understood, it is on a list, and here is why it is behind three other things. That is a respectful answer and it maintains the loop. What breaks the loop is silence, because silence is indistinguishable from the report having gone nowhere.

The second determinant is effort. A report that takes fifteen minutes and requires a login on a machine in the site office will be filed for serious things and never for the small ones, which are the ones with diagnostic value. Reducing the cost of reporting matters more than exhorting people to do more of it.

The third is what happens to the reporter. If the predictable consequence of raising something is being asked why you did not raise it sooner, or being drawn into a lengthy process, the rational response is to fix it quietly and say nothing.

It is also worth attending to who reports and who does not. A site where reports come from a small number of the same people is not a site where only those people see hazards; it is one where everybody else has concluded that reporting is somebody else's activity. The distribution of reporters across the workforce is a more useful measure of the system's health than the count, and it is available from data most organisations already hold and never look at that way.