Does your company have a near miss reporting program?
Maybe it's already embedded into your incident reporting procedures. But when is the last time someone has reported a near miss?
While it takes some work to make employees comfortable reporting near misses, those reports are extremely valuable. They are like a "second chance" for your company to rewind and make some changes before someone gets hurt or property becomes damaged.
Let's take a step back here and discuss what a near miss is.
Near misses are basically just what they sound like. It's an event where no one was hurt, property was not damaged, but it almost happened. Here are some examples that hopefully don't hit too close to home.
In the old way of doing things, these incidents would not have resulted in a report since there was no injury, illness, or property damage. But in that case you would have lost a golden opportunity to learn from the event and prevent it from repeating in the future.
Employees should be encouraged to report near misses. However, if they are at all concerned they may be punished for reporting, they will not be incentivized to report. It's important to stress that no one will be punished for reporting a near miss. Best practices dictate that employees should be incentivized and recognized for reporting any near misses as well.
Once you have that near miss report in hand, your work is not done. It's a great idea to treat these reports the way you would an incident report. Open an investigation, determine root cause with an analysis, and open up any action items needed to mitigate the potential for a related incident in the future.
It's not every day that we get to have specific safety knowledge about our company or industry handed to us on a silver platter. Take advantage of the opportunity and keep everyone just that little bit safer!
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