I Got an Ouchee

How much do you know about your workforce’s minor injuries? What is your reporting culture around minor injuries? What percentage of minor injuries do you know about? Some of these minor injuries are above the waterline. This could be the case if a worker suffers a cut and seeks first aid and it gets recorded or a manager witnesses the minor injury. You can also see some of the iceberg right below the waterline, although it may be distorted. Here we may learn about a minor injury sometime after the fact or learn about one through the grapevine.

Unfortunately, many minor injuries are not reported. Why? Let’s say you are loosening a flange with a wrench and the wrench slips. You bang your elbow pretty good causing a nice bruise. Whatta you gonna do? Go to your supervisor and say “I got an ouchee”? These are rough jobs worked by tough people who might find it embarrassing to make a big deal out of something minor. Maybe these types of bangs and bumps are just considered part of the job and not something to report. Bottom line, you’re worried that if you tell people that you slipped and banged up your arm on the job you’ll earn the label “stupid” or clumsy.

It’s possible that you used a cheater bar to get more leverage from your wrench on the flange bolt. The rules are pretty clear against cheater bars but the tool crib is way over at the loading dock and you and your buddies hid some metal tubing just for this purpose. So you bent the rules (and probably the tubing) when you got your bruise. You gonna tell your boss about this? Probably not.

There are other reasons why you may not report a minor injury. What happened the last time you reported an injury? What was your experience? If you had to be taken off the job and go to the principal’s office to fill out a long form I bet you wouldn’t find it rewarding. You didn’t take this job to be a writer and this form asks a lot of questions that take a lot of words… some of which you’d rather not write because it’s embarrassing. Then when you’re all done you have to assign the incident to a root cause and the top choice on the list to choose from is… “stupid.”

We have to acknowledge that sometimes a minor injury may be reported but not recorded. Perhaps because it might embarrass the person you report to (who didn’t get the new tool you had requested). And recording a minor injury could hurt their numbers. Minor injuries, or first aids, are typically tracked for the trending that can lead to proactive actions to avert a larger incident. But showing an increase in first aids in your unit can lead to unwanted scrutiny by the safety police or upper management. So best to keep those numbers down.

This fact hit home when I visited a refinery where I was kindly given a tour. The refinery had an excellent safety program overall. My guide was doing a good job looking out for our safety. Beyond the usual orientation and PPE, he frequently alerted us to hazards as we walked through the plant; many times we were walking single file so it was incumbent on the rest of us to point to the hazard as well to deliver the information down the line. He pointed to one protruding plate of metal about head level. I remember pointing it out as well. Perhaps I touched the metal itself, perhaps it had some chemical residue, perhaps my safety gloves were clipped to my belt, perhaps later in the day I scratched my ear? Who knows? But after I got back to the hotel I found some type of chemical burn behind the lobe of my ear and down my neck. I debated for a day whether to report it to the refinery or not.

I hesitated to report this minor burn because I was the safety expert coming to the plant to do an assessment and offer suggestions.  It would be embarrassing for me. So it took a couple days to send an email to the safety pro at the plant reporting my small burn and letting him know that it had cleared up. I was willing to complete any minor injury form they required. The email back was surprising. He suggested that I potentially got the rash from another source before arriving at the refinery and there would be no need to report a minor injury. No form. No record. Below the water line.

But don’t we want our employees, work team leaders, contractors, and, um, guests to report when they suffer a minor injury? It’s true that most incidents don’t need to be reported to regulators, but it’s also true that reporting can protect both the employee and company’s interests if the injury turns out to be worse than expected.

The main reason to encourage our workforces to track minor injuries is to be able to collect the data and learn from it. We can study the data and even use analytics to determine trends that suggest the potential for more severe injuries. Uncovering trends allows us to proactively fix hazards and reduce risk-taking before the more severe injuries raise their ugly head.

We can even learn from the individual minor injury by learning about the situation the worker was in and the behaviors that put the worker at-risk. From this context we can analyze the behaviors to come up with actionable solutions.