Resharing that ep #1 of my new podcast Safe AF is now live.
This episode explores the extent of accident underreporting – some research suggests that up to 80% of the incidents that workers experience go unreported.
You can find the pod on Spotify, Apple and I think Amazon. Direct link below:
https://lnkd.in/gTru4sR3
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If I get enough posted comments, experiences, challenges etc. then I’ll analyse the comments and upload as a follow-up post – comments on Spotify or here:
Transcription:
Imagine this scenario. A busy construction site. Dust flying. Machinery roaring. Alex, an experienced crane operator, spots a problem. The crane’s anti-tube block interlock, a safety-critical device, seems faulty. But the project’s behind schedule. The site manager’s breathing down everyone’s neck. Alex feels immense pressure. He thinks, if I report this, the crane’s down for inspection, at least for half a day. I’ll just be extra careful. I can handle it. So he does what researchers call a quiet fix. Maybe overriding the system, or just working around the floor, and says nothing.
Alex’s story isn’t just his. It’s a systematic issue. It highlights the loss of vital info. The noisy fixes, as they’re sometimes called. So why aren’t workplace accidents being reported? And what role does organizational pressure play? Now most of us intuitively know that not everything gets reported. But to what extent? Recent research suggests somewhere between 60-80% of all the experienced incidents in a workplace aren’t even in the national databases.
This underreporting is the core focus of a 2013 study by Probst and Grasso, titled “Pressure to Produce equals Pressure to Reduce Accident Reporting.” Publish an accident analysis and prevention. They aim to investigate a key reason for this high perceived production pressure. Now of course, there are a lot of factors implicated in accident underreporting. I’ll cover some of these in the future. But today is focused on production pressure.
So what is accident underreporting? The study defines it as when reported events don’t match what actually meets the employer’s definition of a reportable event. The bigger the gap, the more underreporting. Essentially, people are experiencing incidents and injuries, but for whatever reason, don’t report them. So let’s check out their methods.
The study surveyed 212 copper mining workers in the southwestern US. They measured several things. One was the perceptions of production pressure using a Likert scale. They also assessed workers for their attitudes towards reporting accidents. Also, whether there’s any perceived consequences of reporting. So workers who reported an accident were asked if they faced negative consequences, like do they ever feel like they’re blamed for the incident?
Do they lose any perks or privileges? Or do they feel like they’re unfairly disciplined because of reporting an accident? And then they assessed actual reporting behaviors. So this is where workers reported if they’d actually experienced any incidents in the past year and whether they reported that incident or not.
So what did they find? Well, as you might expect, underreporting is substantial. The average number of accidents that workers experienced was far higher than those reported. Employers failed to report over 80% of the experienced accidents over the last year.
Not surprisingly, production pressure means more accidents. So high production pressure significantly linked to more experienced accidents overall, according to workers. Furthermore, there was a negative reporting attitude. So high production pressure meant employers were less likely to feel positive about reporting. So it was a very negative experience for them. There was also a fear of negative consequences. So more perceived production pressure led to reporting more negative consequences after an incident and increased underreporting. As perceived production pressure went up, so did underreporting. Essentially, individuals under high production pressure experienced more accidents but reported fewer of them.
So why does this matter? Well, when accidents go unreported, valuable information vanishes. As the study points out, the lack of an accident investigation that would generally follow any incident would prevent employees and their organization from identifying any dangerous organizational, situational, or behavioral patterns, therefore preventing the improvement of the overall organizational health and safety.
Interestingly, other work by these same authors in the US and Italy support the findings. They liken it to a quiet fix as it occurs in quality control. Production pressure, they suggest, determines whether safety problems get a noisy fix, openly addressed, or a quiet fix and therefore remains unreported. Which means leaving the source of the problem and its consequences to crop up again and again.
Now there were some notable limitations. For one, the data relied on self-reports for pressure and reporting behavior, and there was no field observations or detailed interviews with people to validate. It was a single sample from one mining company. Though later research, even from the same authors, reconfirmed these findings across US and Italian firms. Finally, it was cross-sectional, so the direction of causality can’t be established. For example, it’s unknown whether production pressure leads to more accidents, or in contrast, whether employee accidents are more likely to be justified post-ordeal.
So final thoughts? Well, this research underscores that the vast majority of experienced accidents and injuries might get unreported in organizations, and production pressure at least partially explains why. It also highlights that we should focus more on continual learning and improvements from daily work.
This incident investigation learning cycle, while useful, is slow, incomplete, and somewhat reliant on chance. Lastly, it exposes a false assurance that incident data can give us.
We might think that things are safe because the numbers are low, but that’s dangerously misplaced.
As Richard Feynman stated, “Nature cannot be fooled.” The effectiveness of our risk control systems can’t be fooled by false numbers, either.
That’s it on Safe As. I’m Ben Hutchinson, and hope you found this useful.
SafetyInsights.org 