Barriers to Workplace Incident Reporting Culture

Employees as part of their duties with respect to HSE are required to assist their employers to achieve health and safety targets by complying with policies, procedures and processes. One way of living up to this expectation is through incident reporting. Nonetheless, some organizations are knowingly or unknowingly faced with some barriers that challenge good incident reporting and therefore are not able to meet and improve upon their HSE performance.

Let’s dive into some of the reasons why employees fail to report incidents or why they are reluctant to live up to this responsibility:

1. Blame game culture: In a working environment where employers blame workers as the sole reason for an incident occurring, most workers tend to hide incidents and not report them to the HSE department. Workers would rather keep quiet, than to speak up and be the center of attraction. This makes it difficult for the employer to identify incidents and put in place appropriate measures to prevent the incident from reoccurring.
2. Urgency of resolving incidents: Like the common law of economics “ceteris paribus” which translates to- all other things being equal, employees are rational beings and would report incidents when they are certain they will receive urgent feedback and attention in dealing with the incident. However in a workplace where incidents that are reported do not get the needed attention and urgency in solving them, employees are more likely to develop apathy towards reporting incidents which then grows to become a poor reporting culture in the organization.
3. Lack of awareness on incident reporting procedures: For an organization to expect employees to live up to their responsibilities of reporting incidents, it must ensure its reporting procedure is adequately communicated to employees at all levels. Some organizations who may be experiencing a poor incident reporting culture may either lack awareness of the existence of such incident reporting procedure.
4. Cumbersome reporting procedure: Most Employers in their bid to ensure employees report workplace incidents develop an incident reporting procedure or process. The design of these procedures may not to be simple and easy to apply by employees, and tend to make the whole process of reporting a herculean task. As a result, employees would not over burden themselves with more task than they already have yet unfinished.
5. Fear of sanctions: In an organization where there are sanctions prescribed for employees who do not follow laid down procedures, and as a consequence of their actions/inactions lead to an incident, most employees would rather choose not to report the incident as a means to escape the sanctions or protect a colleague from being sanctioned. For the employee, he/she sees not reporting incident as a means escaping the consequence of his/her actions, or doing a colleague a favor.
6. Poor leadership commitment: In reporting workplace incidents to ensure that it is investigated, there must be a high demonstration of leadership commitment. In organizations where leaders view incident reporting and investigation as a waste of time and productivity, most employees are dispirited to report incidents. They would easily take up the behavioral examples of their leaders and fail to report incidents, and the leaders would not have the moral right to reprimand them for not reporting incidents. Employees would simply sweep incidents under the carpet, as they know the they would be thrown out the window by the leaders.
7. Achieving HSE target: Some organizations set out lofty HSE targets which often influence employee incident reporting culture. For example, in an organization where an employee is entitled to certain bonuses after a period of work when no incident had occurred, you would often realize that such employees are likely to hide incidents or better still under report them just as a means to meet the organizational target for the period in order to gain the entitled bonuses. Such acts in the short term may be seen as doing everything possible to meet the HSE target, but in the long term, the consequence would be a major accident with dire implications to the organization.

Organizations faced with these challenges undeniably do not have a positive safety culture at work, thereby influencing their incident reporting culture and in the long term affecting their overall HSE performance. Such organizations will have to take practicable and effective actions to improve their safety culture before they can be able to see an improvement in incident reporting for proactive safety interventions to prevent their reoccurrence.

Written by:

Raphael Badohu

HSE Practitioner.