Article — 5 min read
The counter-intuitive metric
Almost every other number on a safety report is better when it falls. Near-miss reports are not. A site reporting two near misses a month is not safer than one reporting twenty; it is very probably less safe, because the same events are occurring and nobody is writing them down.
This is worth stating explicitly to boards and clients, because a rising near-miss figure presented without explanation reads as deterioration. Presented properly, it is evidence that the reporting culture is working.
What a low reporting rate usually means
- Reporting is slow, awkward or requires a form nobody carries
- Reports disappear and no feedback ever returns to the reporter
- Reporting has historically been followed by blame
- Supervisors discourage reports because they generate work
- Nobody has explained what counts as a near miss
The last is more common than it should be. Operatives frequently believe a near miss means something dramatic. A misplaced trailing lead that someone stepped over is a near miss, and it is exactly the kind of report that indicates a functioning system.
Making reporting easy
The mechanism has to be faster than the alternative of saying nothing. A card in every induction pack, a number to text, or a supervisor who records it on the reporter's behalf will all outperform a form kept in the site office.
Closing the loop
The single most effective way to increase reporting is to show that reports produce action. A weekly toolbox talk that starts with “three of these came from you last week, here is what we did” does more for the reporting rate than any poster campaign.
Reading the numbers together
Near-miss volume on its own says little. Read alongside the proportion closed out, the average time to close, and the trend in actual incidents, it becomes one of the more useful leading indicators available. A site with a rising report count, a high close-out rate and a falling incident count is behaving exactly as it should.
Monthly SHEQ reporting with a corrective-action register is included in our retained appointments and available as a standalone service.