Incident reporting can be a beneficial tool for proactive safety management and understanding what happened and what needs improvement—including highlighting near-misses and “good catches.” Three safety leaders share their best practices for incident reporting.

Sara Young

Safety and training director, Tice Electric Co., Portland, Ore.

Incident reporting is a very important tool for proactive safety management. If you’re able to take a look at an incident and dissect what happened, who it impacted, what caused it and how to prevent something like it from happening again, then that could help another employee to avoid that incident in the future.

In my local area, IBEW and NECA have a joint safety committee, and we share incidents with the entire local. We do this because we are all electricians, doing similar work. If it can happen to us, then it could happen to anyone else.

The goal is to get the information out to ensure that these incidents aren’t repeated. Whether it’s caused by the employee doing the work, someone else on site, or a failure of management, training or a tool—it’s vital to get to the root cause and share that information so that we can keep it from happening again.

It’s good to start an incident report going over what happened in detail. Where were you? What were you working on? What exactly happened? This gives the next person a trigger for when to utilize the information from the report in the future. Then, as you move into identifying contributing factors, it’s good to provide examples and to identify as much that could have been corrected as possible.

For example: a worker falls while improperly using the ladder. Could the worker use extra training? Were they properly trained in the first place? Better yet, could a lift or a safer tool be used in place of the ladder?

Including the impact of the incident is important, too. We don’t want to shame anyone involved, but we do want them to understand what the incident caused. Was there an injury, time loss? What was the cost, and how does that impact their lives and the livelihoods of other employees?

Finally, provide detail on how the incident could have been prevented. I think that it’s important for incident reporting to not involve shame. If an employee has negative feelings associated with reporting an incident, then they will be less likely to report. Employees should be made to feel empowered to share their experiences in order to help others.

It can be easy to want to “hide” incidents for both the employee and the contractor. It’s natural for us to brush our mistakes under the rug. Open, honest conversations and good culture are the most important part of getting accurate information and preventing incidents from happening again.

Editor's Note: you can hear more from Sara Young in the February 2024 issue of Safety Leader.

Nathan Boutwell

Vice president of EHS and training, Powerline Training Consultants, an affiliate of Northline Utilities LLC, AuSable Forks, N.Y.

There is data from Matthew Hallowell, executive director at the Construction Safety Research Alliance, that indicates prejob briefings typically identify only 45% of actual hazards. Considering this, we need to include good catches and near-miss reports as part of our incident reporting models.

This allows us to collect data from multiple sources that also include positive situations where a missed hazard was later identified, caught and corrected prior to a negative event happening. Once we have a system that lets us capture our strengths and weaknesses, that learning can be applied to our safety programs to strengthen them.

Positive data that includes good catches and conversations about controls that worked or did their intended job is valuable information. In retrospect, with knowledge of the negative outcome, it’s easy to find things that failed that need to be strengthened. Many of our missed opportunities live in our successful work where we have controls that work, or near-misses that provide learning-rich improvement opportunities.

A best practice for safety management and incident reporting is leadership’s ability to listen and use humble inquiry. This can be a hard skill to master, but when an incident occurs, start with a key question, “Is everyone OK?” If not, first respond to that need.

Then ask to hear the story, and this can’t be stressed enough: don’t ask any more questions until the person reporting the event has been able to tell the entire story about the injury or good catch.

By hearing the story, without influencing it with questions, we get a fundamental understanding of the event through the eyes of the people involved. It gives us some immediate insight into why the decisions were made, which may have made sense to them at the time. Once we have the story, then we can ask deeper questions about the work, task or challenges. This approach helps us gain understanding about the complexities our teams manage and the balance between production and safety they achieve every day.

The safety professional’s role with incident reporting and safety rules has a checkered past, which in many cases has prevented the workforce from speaking up about the challenges they manage. A key part of our role today is knowing what it takes to influence others, to build trust and to establish credibility. As safety professionals, we can help shape the ideas, decisions and actions of other people inside a company.

We can also use our influence to help a leader approach an incident report with inquiry, to have that desire to learn more before they act. Learning can be unquestioned as a way to help improve performance in an organization, and the safety professional has a key role in building the organization’s confidence.

Kelly Butler

Safety coordinator, Preferred Electric Co. Inc., Charlotte, N.C.

We work with several of the biggest general contractors in the area and occasionally encounter near-misses involving not only our employees, but other contractors as well.

Recently, I was on a job site where the HVAC contractor was pressure testing some copper lines. One failed and there was a loud pop, followed by a rush of air. The contractor had failed to notify workers in the area and there was no signage posted as required by OSHA, but thankfully there were no injuries as there was no one in the area at the time.

It wasn’t pertinent for me to fill out a near-miss report because it wasn’t our action. But when I brought it to the general contractors’ attention, I brought my foreman and the HVAC foreman, and we all talked about what happened and what could have happened. That basically served the same purpose as an incident report because we also talked about corrective action.

I understand that on the following day, the general contractor did have a stand-down and all of the trades on the project were made aware of what happened. The HVAC contractor did finish that testing after hours when no one was on-site.

General contractors can make the difference in preventing these kinds of near-misses by proper coordination of trades. Proper pretask planning is vital in identifying job site hazards, including other trades and their tasks. We all know how to react to an incident—but we all can be more proactive in preventing them.  

Editor's Note: you can hear more from Kelly Butler in the November 2023 issue of Safety Leader.

stock.adobe.com / Weerapat // Sara Young // Nathan Boutwell // Kelly Butler