Near misses: the ones nobody writes down

There’s a rattle in your car. You hear it every time you go round the same roundabout, three weeks running. Then one day you stop noticing it, so you forget about it. Six months later the bearing goes on the motorway.

Near misses are the rattle. Nobody got hurt, so nobody wrote it down, so nobody heard it. Then something goes wrong and everyone stands about saying they never saw it coming.

“Nothing happened, so there’s nothing to report”

This is the one I hear most, and I do understand it. A near miss is by definition the day nothing went wrong. The load swung and missed. The lad stepped back in time. Everyone gets on with the shift, because there’s a wagon waiting and the job needs doing.

But what you just watched was the accident. Same job, same layout, and the only thing that was different was luck. You don’t get to bank luck. It doesn’t carry over to next Tuesday.

I’d take a scruffy note about a load that swung over a tidy folder with nothing in it, every time.

“If I write it up, someone’s getting it in the neck”

This is the real reason, and it’s the one nobody says out loud. If the last person who reported something got a talking to, or watched their mate get one, that’s the end of your reporting. You’ll get the odd trip hazard and nothing else, because trip hazards are safe to report and everything interesting isn’t.

You can’t train your way out of that. You’ve got to change what happens next. When someone tells you the guard was off, the first thing out of your mouth decides whether anybody tells you anything ever again. Ask why it was off. Nine times out of ten it comes off because the job can’t be done with it on, and that’s a design problem you’d never have found any other way.

Make it take thirty seconds

The other killer is the form. If reporting a near miss means finding a supervisor, digging a paper form out of a drawer in the office and filling in eleven boxes, it won’t happen on a busy shift. It just won’t. Whatever you use has to be quicker than the walk back to the machine. A card and a box on the wall beats a system nobody can be bothered with.

Then do something visible with them. Even a scrawled list on the board saying what came in and what got changed off the back of it. People report things when they can see that reporting things works, and that’s most of what building a safety culture actually comes down to.

What you’re really collecting

A near miss log isn’t a compliance record. It’s the cheapest information you’ll ever get about how the work really goes, and it’s been paid for by nobody getting hurt. Every line in it is a free go at a problem before it costs you something.

If yours has been sat empty for months and you’ve been reading that as good news, have another look at it. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on what isn’t getting reported and why, book a stress-free chat and we’ll go through it.