This is an updated version of our original blog post: INCIDENT REPORTING: 7 REASONS WHY IT'S INDISPENSABLE.
Incidents and observations come in many types: safety incidents and accidents, near misses, environmental observations, IT security incidents, claims and flaws in facility or in work environment. What's common to all of these is that in a fast-changing VUCA world, we will experience more and new types of incidents. That's a natural end-result of Technological advancement that creates new risks, new ways for things to wrong and more interconnections for possible systemic failures. Most of us are aware when we see something out of condition and the most thoughtful of us even do the work to fix it, which we call corrective action process. Why is it then not enough to just force everyone in the organisation to correct the faults and defects they notice and pay reward and recognition for it?
Here are seven reasons why incident and observation reporting is indispensable whether you are a small-sized company or a global player:
Most incident report forms identify the barriers that prevent adverse situations from developing into a major accident or disaster. On a large scale this might mean the avoidance of environmental disasters such as the Talvivaara case or just a line between life and death of an employee. On a smaller scale we talk about observations that mitigate issues such as occupational diseases or discomforts or just waste.
The insights that are collected are very important. They help safety, security, environmental, quality and facility managers to identify where additional support is required in order to guarantee that no major incidents happen.
And it’s not just the amount of observations but also the frequency of them that permit the quantitative analysis. Accidents many times begin and develop from atypical occasions. Thus they themselves provide relatively little information about the possibility of future incidents. In contrast, the more and the higher frequency of incidents, the greater insights they give of human error, systems failure, site comparisons, regulatory weaknesses etc.
At no other point in history, has it been more important to be alert and aware. Adapting to VUCA requires agility and agility requires awareness. What's great about the habit of reporting incidents is that helps to put awareness in quantitative terms. It provides a reminder of possible hazards. Reporting incidents provides a way to monitor potential problems and root causes as they recur. The documentation of these problems and root causes increases the likelihood that repeating failures will be noticed and corrected before they develop to more serious incidents.
Incident reporting provides a way to encourage employee, third-party and even customer participation in improvement whether it’s about safety, quality, environmental or security. Everyone can see that their concerns are treated seriously and are acted upon by the organisation. In the end the culture of improvement can be created with two-way communication and everyone being part of it. This of course requires the management to listen carefully and provide the feedback back to the original employee.
The gathered data can be used for comparisons both within and between organisations and industries. What was a good benchmark internally a year ago, may have changed a lot today due to the changing nature of VUCA world. Even though the incident categories and types differ between industries, verticals and even functions, the habit of being aware in the field and documenting and learning from the observations is the same.
The average cost of occupational accident ranges from thousands to millions of euros between industries and countries. Thus even in a global organisation that has tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and service-providers, the cost of maintaining the incident reporting program and/or software is many times cheaper than the cost of accidents or major incident.
Each organisational culture is a set of actions, habits, values, thoughts and beliefs. In organisation-level development areas such as health, safety, quality and environment, the habits are the keystones that affect the culture the most. If you want to create safety culture, start collecting safety observations. If you want to create culture of quality improvement, start collecting quality observations. If you want to raise environmental awareness, start collecting environmental observations.
If you want to learn more about the VUCA world, download our FREE white paper about the topic:
We're a tech company with a passion for helping our customers adapt to the fast changing VUCA world. We're doing that by developing easy-to-use SaaS products that make gathering, managing and analysing field information as easy as possible for the end users. Remove gatekeepers, go horizontal and learn from your mistakes before they actually happen. More info at planbrothers.io.
Incident reporting provides a structured approach to capture observations, analyse data, and drive a culture of continuous improvement across safety, quality, and environmental performance. By implementing and strengthening reporting habits, organisations can detect early warning signs, learn from experiences, and align teams around a shared commitment to safer, higher-quality operations.