Ten Ways Your Organization May Be Defeating its Own Reporting Goals

This is a tough-love talk. Can you handle it?

Reporting is a crucial ingredient in a culture of safety. We can neither analyze nor react to information we don’t have.Your corporate policy should, and likely does, clearly identify reportable events and instruct your personnel to report them. So you’re done, right? It’s in the commandments.

Even experienced Just and Safety Culture organizations may inadvertently and with good intention act in ways that obstruct their own reporting goals and policies.There will never be a shortage of external enemies; we don’t need to defeat ourselves.With that in mind, this is a no-holds barred, tough love talk about self-sabotage. Sometimes the hardest problems to see are the ones we don’t need to leave the room to find.

Here, in no particular order, are ten ways your organization may be defeating its own reporting goals.

1. Insist on Solutions

Good bosses develop their people and want to engage them in problem-solving. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions!”

Sounds great- besides wanting to engage front-line staff, we know that they are often the people who actually have the right answers to operational problems. So engaging them is sensible and appropriate.

But the caveat that a solution be married to each problem is a terrible requirement, and I’ll tell you why: Problems don’t always have obvious solutions, solving problems is actually your job, and your personnel are not children and as such should not be spoken to like they are.

The part of problem solving where you engage the employee who brought the problem to you is the secret handshake sneaky decoder ring part of managing people- solutions can’t be a prerequisite to problems.

Hear problems openly, without defensiveness, and without turning them back on the employee. If you make it harder to talk about a problem than it is for the worker to endure it… well you know what will happen.

2. Only Hear in Writing

Addressing problems doesn’t start when we see them in writing, it starts when we know about them. Knowing about a risk requires action. Period. It probably also requires documentation, but it definitely requires action. An employer cannot invent rules that nullify its legal and ethical responsibilities. Telling personnel that you can’t hear them unless they “put it in writing” discourages reporting. It is also sloppy, rude, and negligent. If you know about a problem, address it.

3. Cumbersome Paperwork

Reporting in a Just Culture can be very detailed. With the end-game of identifying root causes, analyzing data, and mitigating risk, a lot of information needs to be collected. It can be challenging to develop “a system” for capturing that information with consistency.

Systems involving forms that are hard to find or poorly named (think about your online documents), non-intuitive, non-centralized, non-version controlled, or otherwise confusing and work-intensive, deter reporting.

Invest up-front in user-friendly formats, and hear user-feedback willingly. Whenever possible, gather data first-hand, the old fashioned way… by meeting your employee face to face. Today might as well be the day you find out that the guy who’s always hanging around the apparatus doors actually works for you. Forms codify fact; employees have insight.

4. No Time for Trouble

Perfect stewardship of wages- personnel who produce for every minute they are paid- is a noble but impossible goal. 

Too much flexibility in front-line management schedules makes us uneasy. We want to make sure we aren’t paying anyone to read Facebook and eat Ding Dongs, so we schedule the work. But reporting is jeopardized when elective time is squeezed at any level.

Opportunities to identify and mitigate risk surround front-line staff and management. Budget time to act, so that your personnel are not walking past problems they just don’t have time to deal with. A cool thing about minor problems is that if you don’t make time for them, you won’t have any. See what I did there?

5. Assume people know what to do

If you have a reporting process that is “understood”, that was sent by memo or email, or that changed recently or frequently, assume that your staff doesn’t know the process. A centralized repository of policy, procedure, forms, check sheets, and reference material, is the gold standard. Such a library, offering one-stop shopping for resources, is a huge benefit to your personnel, who may only occasionally access some types of reporting, and who do not remember the contents of your ancient memo. It wasn’t interesting the day you sent it, and it hasn’t become a classic since.

Understanding that most organizations have not achieved the “gold standard”, it’s important not to tolerate condescension or a lack of collegiality among staff when people aren’t sure how to report or resolve an issue. Make it a requirement of your conduct policy that personnel across all your silos work cooperatively. Reporting is discouraged by obstructive behaviour- employees who use legalism to delay or withhold information, or to demoralize one another. If this is happening in your organization and you know it’s happening, see number two.

6. Assume people don’t know what to do

In contrast with number five, it’s possible to be over-prescriptive. Your personnel are professionals equipped both to report and address problems common to their worksite. In particular, build into your procedures some flexibility about who staff will deal with in sensitive situations. When we ask our staff to expose errors and system problems, we ask them to put themselves out there. We want them to do the right thing, at the right time, and in just the right way for our centralized systems. Let the right thing at the right time be enough. Meatloaf got it right: “two out of three ain’t bad”.

7. End the Process at the Report

You are a terrific person, skilled at your job, and you espouse a Just Culture with sincerity and impartiality. You’ve worked hard to deserve the trust and respect of your staff. I know I sure like you.

Thing is, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but here I go- your staff don’t all see you that way. It’s not personal; they don’t trust you for the same reason some people don’t like boating, flying, and big dogs: you can hurt them.

It’s not enough that you know what’s going to happen after a report is made. You are not the person who is worrying about it at night. You are not the person who needs to see the process in order to develop confidence in it. Shutting personnel out of the loop after receiving their report makes them nervous, and erodes their trust in a system whose very foundation is trust. It’s also unkind and discourteous (which you are not).

To the greatest extent possible, build a communication loop right into your process- it’s not going to hurt your sketchy reputation.

8. Fail to Acknowledge your History of Failing

If your organization is in a period of cultural transition, you may be acting with a poor record behind you. It might be your own personal track record, or that of others. Regardless, in the voice William Schneider cleverly coined ‘the past exonerative tense’… mistakes were made.

Your personnel know all about your organization’s mistakes. They probably even have accurate insight about the causes. Pretending that you don’t know makes you look either stupid or untrustworthy- possibly both. Transparency invites transparency, and acknowledging past failure shows that you’ve set a new course.

9. Fail to Protect Privacy

Who gets to know what should be rationally decided, and clearly articulated in your process. There will be people in your organization who need to know every detail of an event, but few require identifying data. An “information firewall” between information collected during incident review and information being released is a necessary feature of your incident review process.

Never tolerate or participate in unauthorized conversation about reports or incident reviews. Disclosing confidential information “off the record” is at very best gossip, and it’s one of the best ways to damage your personal reputation and your organization’s at the same time. Know someone in your organization who has a big mouth? See number two.

10. Forget your Manners

Arrive on time. The napkin goes in your lap. Say please and thank-you. We know the rules, but sometimes we neglect them- especially that last one. Employees who report near-misses and adverse events are acting for the safety of everyone in the workplace. Thank them.

That was a long tough talk. Want the short version?

Punish people for talking, and they will stop doing it no matter what your policy says. If your organization wants to encourage hazard, near-miss and accident reporting, communicate this to your staff not only with clear policy, but with behaviour that doesn’t conflict with that policy.

*This article originally appeared in Just Policy, and has been adapted for this use.