Guide to Addressing the Underreporting of Safety Incidents

Safety underreporting more pervasive than previously considered

Safety managers have long cited the underreporting of safety incidents in the workplace – accidents, injuries, and illnesses – as a major hurdle to improving safety performance and cementing a positive safety cultureⁱ. But it appears even frontline managers have underestimated the sheer number of safety incidents that go underreported. Not only is safety reporting more pervasive than previously considered, it’s also happening across business lines and at every level of the organization.

How bad is the issue? A recent Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace survey put the global total at 25 percentⁱⁱ. That’s a full quarter of workplace incidents, including near misses, as well as injuries and property damage events, go underreported. When you zero in on Australia, the figure balloons to 31 percent; some Australia-based firms even report numbers as high as 66 percent. Indeed, credible evidence from the field suggests that all firms suffer from safety incident underreporting. Even the International Labour Organization has called out national reporting numbers on occupational accidents and diseases as incomplete, noting underreporting is rife and official reporting requirements don’t cover all categories of workersⁱⁱⁱ.

Across the Pacific, in the U.S., reporting rates are even worse. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 69 percent of injuries and illnesses never make it into the nation’s annual workplace safety and health report card, the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII)iv. Consulting data in the SOII, in turn, helps the federal safety regulator, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), come up with regulations to pressing safety issues.

What’s more, top-line survey data, if anything, underplays the full implications of the safety incident underreporting problem. For instance, a full 50 percent of workers reported experiencing at least one incident in the last year. Thirty percent of workers failed to report at least one incident; that averages out to a rate of 6.3 unreported incidents per worker^v.

Nor is the underreporting of safety incidents the exclusive provenance of frontline workers; though those workers experience the largest number of safety incidents. Higher ups underreport, as well, even when they’re directly responsible for promoting a positive safety culture or own safety performance metrics. That’s not all, frontline managers and senior business leaders underreport a lot: 15 and 21 percent, respectively^vi. On a per-person basis, senior business leaders, precisely because they experience relatively few incidents, actually underreport nearly twice as many incidents as their frontline subordinates^vii. 

The cost of underreporting safety incidents

These rates are hardly conducive to creating a thriving safety culture. And, of course, the lack of that culture has major cost implications down the line, like the devaluing of near miss analysis.

Left underreported and unvalidated, near misses – events where injury to people or damage to property didn’t happen but could have – often escalate to larger incidents.

Indeed, near misses and small safety incidents point to stresses on and in the larger safety system. The cost of near-miss and small incident underreporting, then, gets borne out as the much larger cost of (eventual) safety incidents. Those costs are enormous; so big that for PCBUs (Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking), the costs can be value crippling, if not business destroying.

For context: the federal regulator, Safe Work Australia reported that the median payout for a serious worker’s compensation claim stood at AUD$11,500, a 39 percent year-over-year increase^viii. Meanwhile, indirect costs also soared; the median time lost for a serious claim jumped 32 percent in the same time period^ix.

Predictably, median costs in high-impact sectors are even higher. Again, in Australia, the average cost of a construction incident and injury shouldered by employers, workers, and the community ranged from AUD$3,372 for short absence injuries to AUD$1,689,193 for full permanent incapacity^x.

Finally, the global snapshot paints a truly devastating picture. The International Labour Organization estimates that some 2.3 million women and men around the world succumb to work-related accidents or diseases every year; this figure corresponds to over 6,000 deaths every single day. And worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of workrelated illnesses annually^xi.

According to estimates from the U.S. safety statistics reference source, Injury Facts, workplace injuries and deaths cost the U.S. economy over USD$150 billion. Of that total, employers and workers lost nearly USD$50 billion in wages and productivity. Employers alone incurred over USD$12 billion in uninsured costsxii. Safety regulators can also levy steep fines or even close businesses (temporarily or permanently) due to near misses^xiii.

Other direct costs include increased insurance premium payments and damages to plants and machineries. Besides lost productivity, indirect costs consist of entrenching unhelpful safety attitudes and behaviours, the rooting of which only serves to further elevate safety risk.

It’s not just costs, either. Reporting small incidents and near misses generate quality-of-business benefits, as well. The clearest benefit is the opportunity to absorb the vital learnings reporting incidents provide. The reported data and analysis help teams get to the bottom of incident causes, learning and improving for next time. A Safety team empowered to efficiently report their near misses and small incidents also sees gains in engagement, productivity, quality, and efficiency. 

Why safety reporting rates are so low

If the costs are so high and the benefits so positive, why then are safety reporting rates low? The reasons are manifold. For starters, research suggests that systematic underreporting is likelier to occur in working environments with poorer organizational safety climates or where supervisor safety enforcement is inconsistentx^iv. In other words, safety culture matters; supervisors need to step up with consistent enforcement. 

The causes go deeper, still. Sure, organizations with proactive safety cultures and/or public compliance postures usually have lower rates of underreported safety incidents. But they aren’t perfect – not by a long shot.

Why? Part of it is the nature of safety reporting itself. Frontline workers don’t always know what conditions should trigger reporting, doubly so in the case of near misses. The manuals or other sources of critical information that would inform them (if even centralized) aren’t always available to frontline workers in the field.

Additional survey data reveals an overall reluctance on part of workers to generate incident reports. When workers do, the reports often provide too little (or no) insight on how to prevent the incident from happening again^xv. One of the reasons why: workers argue that bureaucratic inertia means that they don’t receive substantive feedback on reported incidents^xvi. 

But they’re more practical reasons, too. Some PCBUs inadvertently make reporting difficult. Paperwork can be confusing and safety processes can be needlessly convoluted^xvii. As such, workers, perennially time strapped, become less inclined to fill out reports, especially if they don’t feel that the firm is handling reports and investigations seriously or that the actions resulting from investigations are satisfactory. Other psychological reasons why workers don’t report safety incidents include the following:

• Fear
• Embarrassment
• Loss of reputation^xviii

What’s more, frontline workers, especially in construction, agribusiness, and mining, just don’t have the ability to report observations, near misses, incidents, and hazards from the field. If not completely manual, a lot of safety management tools don’t provide mobile functionality that’s usable outside of the office, i.e. on the actual work site.

In turn, workers have to wait until they’re back in the office to report on the incidents or near misses they experienced in the field. It’s only natural, then, that workers forget important details of the incident, details that would help spur insights into how to prevent the event from happening in the future. Sometimes, workers forget about the incident or near miss altogether. In both scenarios, reports aren’t generated in real time, when the incident actually takes place.

How to get your team reporting regularly on safety incidents and near misses

So, what’s the solution? As mentioned, PCBUs’ pursuing public and/or private safety compliance strategies log higher rates of safety reporting than those that don’t. In the latter camp, workers show relatively low levels of discretionary effort towards safety reporting, most likely because they’ve received the tacit message from managers and other business leaders that safety procedures are simply barriers to getting work done^xix.

That’s why PCBUs must get serious about developing proactive safety cultures and communicating to workers that incident and near-miss reporting is foundational to fulfilling the mission of the Safety program. One way of doing so is by reinforcing the benefits of a safety culture across the organisation, not only to frontline workers but to site managers, senior safety leaders, and the C-suite, as well. Some of the benefits of a building a safety culture include:

• Fewer critical safety incidents and less damage to facilities and equipment 
• Lower rates of injury and illness
• Reduced costs
• Improved productivity and higher employee engagement

Reinforcing the importance of reporting through rigorous trainings and site-specific inductions also makes a difference. While many jurisdictions mandate training as part of a worker’s induction, the quality of those trainings can vary widely. Poor training, minimal involvement in safety initiatives, and low supervision all imperil workers, though, especially workers who’ve barely acquired the necessary skills or safety knowledge to pursue the job at hand.

And, of course, there’s improving reporting functionality. As noted, workers often decry not having the ability to report incidents, hazards, and observations when they’re in the field. Instead, they often have to wait until they’re back in the office, by which time they might have forgotten key details of the incident in question.

The obvious solution, here, is to procure mobile-accessible, integrated safety management software that gives workers easy-to-use, responsive incident reporting capabilities in the field. Those reporting capabilities must be robust; workers should be able to capture a whole range of event report types, including safety, environmental, near misses, injuries, security, compliance, complaints, suggestions, etc.

Also, for PCBUs pursing proactive compliance postures undergirded by strong reporting fundamentals, it’s important to take an integrated approach to incidents, hazards, and risks across business lines and with regards to all stakeholders: not just staff but contractors, volunteers, and members of the public as well.

Technology, here, can help. Risk management is important. But when safety risks become full-blown safety incidents, incident management capabilities (for the reporting and management of all environmental, health and safety events) have to be integrated into the same flexible, safety management solution. Specific functionality to facilitate collaboration among multiple stakeholders include flexible dashboards, analytics, as well as reporting.

And when it comes to near-miss analysis, in particular, teams must often ask: how much risk is too much risk? Workplace safety risk management is all about identifying, evaluating, and determining the safety risks an organization is exposed to and coming up with policies, processes, and procedures to control those identified hazards. To make the process manageable, integrated safety management software must help, providing functionality to make risk assessment, treatment, and, of course, reporting easier. Which specific capabilities? Standard hazard workflows are vital; so too is technology that comes with thousands (yes, thousands) of standard risks and controls.

What’s more, the need for comprehensive investigation often comes out of a thorough risk assessment. Safety management software should facilitate, initiating and tracking investigations using best-practice standard methodologies, including ICAM and Five Why. Preconfigured investigation workflows will further expedite the process, enabling teams to drive safety KPIs in the right direction with best-practice management techniques. The same logic also applies to managing safety assurance activities, like audits, inspections, non-conformances, and other actions.

In conclusion, safety incident reporting rates are depressingly low, as frontline workers and safety leaders alike underreport at a shocking clip. The consequence of safety incident underreporting can be seen in the unacceptably high cost of safety injuries and illnesses as well as property and equipment damage for PCBUs.

But there’s a solution. Developing a proactive safety culture and pursing a compliance posture are the traditional first steps towards addressing safety incident underreporting. The next steps are just as important, though. Those include procuring the right, mobile-friendly integrated safety management tools to enable frontline workers to easily report safety incidents from the field. Implementing those solutions will only help PCBUs recoup the benefits of a proactive safety culture faster, i.e. enjoy lower costs, fewer safety incidents, and improved worker productivity.

Citations

i Sigmund Aslesen et al., IGLC: Improving Safety Performance: Using deviation Reporting as a Source of Continuous Improvement. Available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abbd/085074549fee17392665367240bcecc60f9b.pdf.

ii Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safety-incident-reporting/.

iii International Labour Organization, International Labour Office: Improvement of national reporting, data collection and analysis of occupational accidents and diseases. Available at https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---safework/documents/publication/wcms_207414.pdf.

iv The Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives: Hidden Tragedy: Underreporting of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses. Available at https://www.bls.gov/iif/laborcommreport061908.pdf.

v Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safetyincident-reporting/.

vi Ibid.

vii Ibid.

viii Safe Work Australia: Australian Workers’ Compensation Statistics, 2016-2017. Available at https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/1901/australian-workers-compensation-statistics-2016-17_1.pdf.

ix Ibid.

x P.X.W. Zou et al., The University of New South Wales: Return on Investment of Safety Risk Management System in Construction. Available at https://www.irbnet.de/daten/iconda/CIB_DC24348.pdf.

xi International Labour Organization, Work Statistics. Available at https://www.ilo.org/moscow/areas-of-work/occupational-safety-and-health/WCMS_249278/lang--en/index.htm.

xii Kevin Druley, Safety and Health Magazine: The ROI of safety: What to consider when analyzing the economic benefits of safety. Available at https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/17819-the-roi-of-safety.

xiii Ben Sandilands, INQ: Safety report details breach that got Tiger Airways grounded. Available at https://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2013/12/18/safety-report-details-breach-that-got-tiger-airways-grounded/.

xiv Tahira Michelle Probst and Armando X Estrada, Accident; analysis and prevention: Accident under-reporting among employees: Testing the moderating influence of psychological safety climate and supervisor enforcement of safety practices. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44663588_Accident_under-reporting_among_employees_Testing_the_moderating_influence_of_psychological_safety_climate_and_supervisor_enforcement_of_safety_practices.

xv Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safety-incident-reporting/.

xvi Laura Walter, EHS Today: NSC 2011: The Top 9 Reasons Workers Don’t Report Near Misses. Available at https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/management/9-reasons-near-miss-reporting.

xvii Ibid.

xviii Ibid.

xix Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safetyincident-reporting/.