Safety Knights

Developing a program for near misses sounds like a fantastic idea! Would you be willing to share your program with me? After review, perhaps I can offer some tips.

From my experience I would have a training with those expected to investigate near misses as to help properly define what a near miss looks like for your building. Additionally, getting a foundational group understanding that reporting near misses is beneficial for the long-term safety of the company and not another way employees may feel that they are getting in trouble.

Make sure the workers are trained on what is considered a near miss and the procedures for reporting them. Also making sure workers feel safe reporting without retaliation is another big piece. When I have tried implementing these in the past workers were worried that they would get in trouble for reporting a near miss and didn't understand the reasoning behind why we wanted to know about them.

I would suggest adding hazards as an additional reporting category to include things that may be a potential for an injury but no one has been in the situation yet like a near miss. I have utilized at a couple places QR code through Safety Culture's free iAuditor software that employees can report through which helps. "Safety Suggestion Boxes" are an option too if old school is more the culture of the company or phones are not permitted. A couple places I've worked we also implemented an incentive program to kick off the hazard reporting. I don't like ongoing incentive because it tends to get a lot of "junk" reporting.

I have seen both sides of Near Hit/Miss programs. If you are using them as "Free School reports" and sharing the information across your divisions, then it can be highly successful. A "Free School report" is one where the incident almost happened but there is no equipment damage or no one was injured. We called them free school reports because you learned the lesson but didn't have to pay the tuition in equipment damage or Workers' Comp claims).

However, they have to be 100% discipline free. If you use these to count negatively against an employee then they will stop turning them in.

I think anyone who has worked a day in their lives know that near misses happen ALL THE TIME:

- While stepping off the curb, I tripped and "nearly" fell to the ground.
- While trying to administer a shot to an animal in the shelter, the dog snapped at me (but didn't make contact).
- While arresting a drunk and disorderly person, the person took a swing at the officer (but missed).
- While chucking up a piece of steel in the lathe, the employee did not have all the chuck teeth close enough to the shaft. When the employee turned the chuck, the piece of steel fell out of the chuck (and employee did not attempt to catch it).
- An employee while moving an overhead pendant crane to the paintbooth to pick up the motor did not see the other overhead crane in the path. The safety contact bar on the crane contacted the other safety contact bar shutting off power to the crane in motion (no contact was made).
- An officer was reaching under the clothing rack to capture a RAL (running at large) cat. The cat bit the officer's hand but he was wearing thick leather driving gloves.
- A Fleet mechanic was backing out of the shop at the same time a streets operator was driving into the yard. The back-up warning went off and the Fleet mechanic stopped before making contact.
- A summer seasonal employee was using a zero-turn mower to mow the angled area above one of the channels. The grass was wet and the mower slid down hill stopping on the concrete ledge of the channel.

This is just a quick sample of the examples of near-misses that I have seen over my career. All of these near-misses were reported and no disicipline was given to the employees involved.

When I worked at one of the surface coal mines, the company failed with their near-miss program. The second an employee was called in for a meeting with the maintenance supervisor, maintenance manager, safety supervisor, and safety manager they were deemed a "witch hunt" and management could never understand why people stopped turning in the near-miss reports. They even foolishly decided to "reward" their employees who turned them in with prizes randomly drawn each month. They may have received more near-miss reports but the quality (and validity) went down immensely.

Another company I worked for (who had a very successful program and a BBS program), eliminated the spot for the name of the employee. Since they were anonymous, there could be no disciplined applied to the employee, and we received a ton of them. Plus, their sheets were one page and had all the great safety-related information on it (date, time of day, location, potential harm/damage, and contributing factors that prevented the near-miss from being an incident).

Aside from having no discipline, the #1 reason why they continued to receive them was the fact the information was shared with all divisions regardless if the other divisions used the same equipment, practices, and/or methods.

Good luck with your new program!!!

I think everyone who has commented is spot on with their observations and experience. A company I worked for used QR codes and we encouraged our subs to join in on hazard and near miss reporting. Including your name was optional and put you in the running for a random quarterly swag drawing. I did regular training/tool box talks about hazards and near misses and how to use the reporting system. I noticed I got more engagement in the days after a training. I also realized that most of the field workers don't recognize hazards as hazards. For them it was a normal part of the job, so helping them to identify the cord running down the hallway zig zagging back and forth as hazard, helped them see how it was also a near miss and could have led to an incident.

The biggest barrier to reporting that was expressed to me was time. With a QR code it meant stopping what they were doing and taking the 3 minutes to complete the report. To their foreman, they were on the phone, not working, and slowing down progress. If they wait until they got a break before reporting, chances were they would forget to report. To help I did regular site walks and made it a point to ask about identified/corrected hazards that should have been reported. That seemed to help.

Best of luck!

At a former employer we had near miss reports and what we called "speak ups for safety". For the NM, something had to have happened but no damage, no injury - so they were limited. "Speak-ups" reporting was more open-ended and could be anything that might impact safety - ideas, potential incidents, observations, employee behavior recognitions, almost anything.

What really caused the "speak up" reporting was when upper management took ownership of it and held site management accountable. Management mandated at least 2 "speak-up" reported per site each week. This was not hard as this was all heavy industrial and the nature of it is that there's always some safety issue somewhere. Once management did this, the numbers took off and became competitive among the sites.

The safety team would review these reports and produce a report on trends and recommendations. While there was a lot of little stuff, it quickly showed value in that some "speak ups" were actually near misses or psifs that did not get properly identified.