Dusty Roach
Summer is gone, temperatures are dropping, and we can reset the thermostat. Before you know it, the temperatures will drop to a tolerable level. There are no more hot weather conditions causing heat issues. Now is the time to prepare for winter. Remember that proper planning prevents poor performance. That also applies to safety. It is time to prepare for extreme weather conditions. It is also the season to prepare for budgets to submit to the stockholders. We plan for just about every contingency to streamline operations, and we trim the budget to increase profitability. These are normal practices.
One thing that is prevalent in the safety world, regardless of the rules and regulations, is you can plan on having late reporting. Late reporting is as prevalent today as it was in the ’70s. Regardless of the games people play between the laborers, mid-management, and even upper management, no one likes to report an accident. Sure, most companies have made strides in overcoming these issues, but there are still pitfalls in late reporting of incidents and accidents. It is a difficult task to get everyone to buy into reporting every injury, immediately, regardless of how small it is. It is especially true in our rough and tough macho-driven industry.
It is not only in our industry that companies fall prey to the reporting pitfalls. It also happens in the government. People do not like to report everything, especially when it comes to a failure—e.g. Butler, Pa. Late reporting of accidents and failures, regardless of rules and direction, is a reality that admits of failure in the system. Failures are covered up by delaying full reports so there is time to produce a viable explanation. Another ploy often utilized is the claim of “insufficient data.” Insufficient data is cited frequently, and maybe not always in total candor. Have you ever seen or worked on an accident that yielded a conclusion of “insufficient data” and the conclusion didn’t make sense? Such conclusions generally boil down to, “I didn’t think it was that bad, so I didn’t report it immediately.” Why? It is usually because they did not trust that they would not be fired. Or they legitimately thought the accident/incident was not that bad to begin with until the failure escalated in nature.
Make no mistake about it, late reporting or no reporting, more times than not, is a costly judgment call. Employees, when sustaining a perceived minor accident, usually rationalize it by not reporting the incident. They convince themselves that it’s not that big of a deal, Then, when their misguided judgement takes a bad turn and it ends up being more severe than anticipated, they are between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately, when trying to explain their late reporting, they resort to (1) I didn’t think it was a big deal or that serious, (2) it was a time sensitive project, and I wanted to get finished, or (3) I didn’t want to get written up for not following standard safety protocols. And the list goes on.
There is a saying that “the Devil is in the details,” and when it comes to accidents, surely the “details,” which eventually come out in the report, tell us much. Such details, sometimes referred to as identifying factors, can include fatigue, lack of tools, lack of supervision, lack of planning adequately for the task at hand, lack of qualified labor force, and lack of time, as well as misjudgment of schedules, all of which reflect lack of proper planning. The different reasons for late reporting could fill a book by themselves. Such responses normally are referred to as Behavior Justification. It is difficult to pin down an error-free solution, mainly because we are dealing with people. We can predict, plan, monitor, and enforce, but it all goes out the window when we do not train in values. If a person has no values, then once again we are back to zero.
My solution, from experience, has been an intangible, non-quantifiable solution called building trust. If a person falters by having an accident and not reporting it immediately, we can “root cause it” to death, fire them, write them up, or take their first-born child, but it won’t change the culture. They have to trust that, while it may be true that they erred, it is not the end of the world. We all are learning until the day we die. If you urge workers to report everything and they do, and then someone gets fired, then you have earned their distrust in the rule to report everything. The evidence does not support your story. Their perceptions will run counter to the advice you gave, and for all practical purposes, you have become, in their eyes, a liar.
As long as I can remember in the oilfield, employers have said report everything, no matter how small it is. They say report all accidents immediately, which is defined as “without the passing of time.” If you, as managers and company leaders, expect this, you must support this, by your actions and not by your words only.
It’s not how many hits you have in baseball that wins games! It is how many times you reach home safely that counts. —Dusty
Dusty Roach is a safety professional based in Midland. He is also a public speaker on subjects of leadership and safety, and he maintains a personal website at dustyroach.com.
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