To the same point, the company I work for, a LARGE const company, about 10 years ago started promoting the behavior of reporting "near misses", something that "almost" casued an accident or injury. At the time I was skeptical about it because of alot of the reasons mentioned in the previous posts. After time I grew to support the policy of reporting near misses so that others could learn from someone else's mistakes.
Well with our recent goals of ZERO incident and injuries, which for a top 10 const company, is actually coming to fruition. Our overall TRIR is well below 1 and our LTFR is very near zero. WIth this emphasis, the executives are seeing the dollar signs involved and now "near misses" are considered incidents and craft employees are being punished for this. This has now, expectedly, led back to the old behavior of hiding a near miss.
Similar situation with the OP's post about teh truck bumper.
We are now making the employees less comfortable with reporting their mistakes due to teh fear of punishment.
It's gone full circle and headed in the wrong direction again.
We have become our own worst enemy in the "quest for zero incidents." To the extreme that in the 12 yrs I've worked for the company, driven close to 500k mi in a company truck, never wrecked one, many dents and dings, mostly from my employees using the truck, this past year I had 3 "incidents."
1. Backed into a car taking evasive action to not get run over by a tanker truck cutting a corner. Minor damage to both vehicles. Yes, my new truck would have been toast. The previously damaged fence and busted power pole on htat corner are proof that the tankers sometimes cut the corner and blow thru the intersection.
2. Got called in by another motorist for talking on my cell phone while driving.
WTH, love Washington!
3. 2 guys excited about their holiday weekend hit my truck in a parking lot.
This resulted in me losing my truck for a period of time as "punishment."
Sure, I'm afraid to report what happens now. After driving hundreds of thousands of safe miles and contributing $millions in profits over the years I get punished for that crap?
Oh just had 4 high ranking district managerial employees terminated because a DBE subcontractor lied to us about the supplier of their equipment and after the fact the sub was found to not be contributing a "commercially useful function" per the DBE laws. Only one of the 4 people was actually responsible for the sub's work onsite and likely the only person with the knowledge of the sub's errors, however, 3 long time accountants got the axe too becasue they played a role in the "contract administration."
We fired 4 valued, career employees, yet that sub still works for us on other projects................double standard.
Also had a junior PM lose his job over making waves with one of our Demo subs due to their unsafe actions. The fact that teh Demo guy had a much bigger financial impact on other projects got him the hall pass and our PM got fired over it. ANother double standard with respect to our "Zero incidents" policy!
Not defending the employees specifically in the first post as honesty is still the best policy, but theres some good examples posted above as to the justifacation to hide a mistake or accident.
