Have you ever wondered how some organizations are able to achieve great safety performance year over year? Sure, a natural inclination would be to assume that they are “cooking the books” or using incentives that directly or indirectly entice employees not to report accidents. While I can’t definitively say that doesn’t happen, let’s assume for the sake of our discussion that the “great” companies really are that good. If that’s the case, your next question should be, “How are they doing it?”

First, in order to achieve some level of success, companies need to have the commitment of top management, an ongoing process to inspect their workplaces and make corrections, and solid training programs. These are the same things you are likely to be doing today, right? Good organizations also investigate accidents to understand what happened and what they could or should be doing to prevent re-occurrence. They employ causal analysis techniques to uncover all the process and system deficiencies that contributed to the accident and don’t limit their investigations to only the employee involved. Better organizations do all of these things but also include near miss reporting.