Dusty Roach
Greeting and salutations! I hope this month’s edition finds you doing well as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the downturn in the oil and gas business. This month we are tackling an age-old issue—one not limited to our business but certainly a main factor. The issue is reporting incidents, accidents, and near misses. Most every established company has policies and procedures for reporting. Our industry has made progress by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years regarding this issue of accurate reporting. However, there are still gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Companies have policies specifically stating that one must report all accidents, incidents, and near misses. This is a critical directive that confers benefits to any company as they develop best practices, implement procedures to prevent recurrence, reduce residual risk, and increase efficiency. However, there are numerous “real world” flaws in the gathering of information.
Here is why:
- The workers in the field have a reluctance to report all incidents, near misses, etc., due to:
- reporting being a time-consuming hassle, an imposition.
- the chance that the operating company would run the (service) company off, in spite of their honest intentions.
- investigations interfere with operations.
- there is a perceived risk that employees who report such matters will lose their job simply by being transparent and truthful.
- workers are dismissive of the potential danger, and they minimize it—but this comes about because they don’t know the true ramifications.
- The safety personnel tends to exaggerate the amount of danger and they try to justify their job under the guise of thoroughness, thereby embellishing the risk and consuming time away from operations.
- There are three reasons why reporting is lacking: people are unwilling, unable, or untrained.
In order to alleviate any or all of the real-world issues of reporting, several actions must take place.
It is important to keep reporting in its proper context. If there is an observation that an employee stepped in a hole and mildly twisted his ankle but shakes it off, what is the motivation to report it, other than reporting is policy? Most employees will not. Why? The reason why is trust. They can trust a safety guy will make a mountain out of a molehill. First, he will alert the company man of the hazard. Then the company has to ensure that the hole is filled. Reports are made. Operations are suspended. The company man looks bad, the safety guy is now a clown for doing his job. The contractor is justifiably frustrated, embarrassed, and worried about the loss of business. This happens frequently. The company man, who gets bonuses for the safe completion of a job, starts looking at lost revenue, endless reports, root cause analysis, meetings, reviews of performance, etc.
You may think the example above is an embellishment or exaggeration. I can assure you it is not. I have witnessed countless comparable scenarios with little or no variation. As sure as I say this, there is a large contingent of those involved from top to bottom who will deny this. Intentions are never so perfect as when participating in an accident review board. The higher up, the more indignant, when the motivation is questioned. I have witnessed this with the majors, large independents, and the mom and pops.
So now let us go back to methods of better reporting. I mentioned trust earlier. Building trust with the men in the field and upper management is crucial. The amount of reaction needs to be commensurate to the event. This can be established by not making a mountain out of a molehill and, conversely, not skating over or downplaying potential catastrophic events. The cultivation, communication, and education of what is expected is paramount. This goal falls on training, leadership, and reinforcement (not just by repetitive regurgitation of the rules) but what is genuinely expected. If workers are unwilling to be supportive and play nice, they need to go or be convincingly retrained regardless of their self-perceived worth.
Half the battle is identifying the real-world truth on reporting and having a business-like approach to build trust. If you exhibit honesty and empathy, it will pay huge dividends and gain trust in the system. Then and only then will you gain support for reporting the small, as well as the huge, near misses. The best place to start an effective reporting program is in the mirror. Lastly, I have found the largest gap in reporting is found in mid-management. They are the ones caught in the middle of these conundra. When they talk to upper management, productivity and profit are number one! It is about the money. When middle management talks to the workers in the field, they reiterate the money aspects. Safety is not the highest priority—at least not until a major accident or incident pops up. It is then that they begin their story and usually start the blame game. This is a survival mechanism.
Regardless how you feel or stand on the subject, not all accidents and incidents are reported. With trust, training, and evidence of caring, they will be won over. That will be a home run. Have a blessed month. Hang in there, boom times will return.
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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.