Give it to your work teams to sort out by taking a learning and coaching approach. Then they make a basic report on a quarterly or 6 monthly basis on what they have learned or adopted from near miss discussions within the team.

We have action cards in Lunchroom Minor accident (paper cut etc), a near miss (something fell over next to me), and Hazard (that could fall on me). To be honest I have trouble getting guys to report. They are lazy and its easier to walk away than go and fill in a little card all the time.

At the weekly meetings or monthly meeting just ask if there were any near misses, minute and process accordingly. Sometimes easier to have one person on the site that does the data entry so they just verballr report it to that person. I find some staff don't like to be know so a suggestion box method works where they can put the near miss or hazard in a note and pop it in the box and the H&S Rep check it once a day. At one site the staff used to text the information through. Speak to the staff and see what options they prefer. Normally more than one approach works

I explain a near miss as an incident that didn't realise it's full potential. To expand - if something happens and it had the (real) potential to harm someone then it is a near miss. If something happens and a person is injured then it is an incident. The distinction between an incident and a near miss is the presence (or lack of) injury.
To illustrate in a more real life way - someone dropping a hammer from a ladder when someone is in the immediate vicinity , and the person on the ground suffers no harm, is a near miss. Had the person been in a different position or the hammer fallen in a different direction then an incident could have occurred. This, to me, is a real near miss (or near hit as some people refer to it).
Hope this helps!

Explain that they are a free lesson!

Genesis Energy used to have individual KPIs for reporting, including a minimum number of near miss incidents, and they could be from work or outside of work. As you might imagine, some people just took the p!ss and wrote nonsense like coming across a banana peel on the footpath when they went out to buy lunch, and a missing cloth from the kitchenette. While it would be good to aim for reporting all near miss incidents, a number of factors probably impact the effectiveness of doing so, including awareness / recognition of near miss events as they occur, attitude about having to report it and how easy / simple it is to do so, perceived value of reporting, etc. There is as much potential to learn from a good near miss report as from any other investigation findings, so most of this comes down to coaching, facilitating and leading a gradual movement toward consistent reporting.

We have a variety of ways to communicate near Miss reporting. Staff can report an incident electronically through our system. This identifies all the important information and actions taken at the time so we can do root cause analysis. It may be filled out my anyone involved or on the behalf of someone which is often done by a health and safety representative. We do this as some staff my be under time pressure or a little unsure about filling this out themselves.
Each report is mentioned in the safety meetings which is open for all staff to attend. We discuss any issues and decide on solutions in those meetings. All staff members involved with the incident are also involved with solutions and outcomes. If the incident is considered a high risk then the incident is pushed up the chain for upper management to sort.
Feedback from those minutes are available to staff via our intranet or meeting board in the staff room. The meeting board also has hazard and done it cards for staff to fill out, similar to what Amdrew P said. Any important issues or changes are communicated to staff via e-mail, site newsletters and safety alerts.
I'm not sure if anything we do is innovative but our system tries to cover all bases.

Think of the ladder. Mr Jones climbs the ladder, gets halfway up and the steps of the ladder break sending him sliding all the way to the bottom. No injury to himself but the potiental of harm/serious harm was there, and yes it is an oh Sh#t moment.

I avoid the term near-miss when talking to workers and opt for near-hit or near-accident. To avoid the reporting of trivia I use the word 'meaningful' as opposed to 'meaningless'.

I did a piece of work some years ago on near miss frameworks which gave me the opportunity to ascertain many different contractor approaches, which were wildly different. I also - as part of my PhD - set up a confidential near miss reporting system online that people could access via their phone. Very cheap to set up and manage. I think the key is not to set targets (how many near miss reports), and critical to feed back to the workforce the outcomes of their reports. Communication and culture are the key issues. Happy to discuss further with you. Look me up on LinkedIn or message me directly.

We only really collect the high potential ones - usually verbally as our guys do not access computers/phones.
We give safety rewards (vouchers, chocolate bars) for the better ones (high potential).
These are also up for nomination of our value awards - bigger voucher and newsletter announcement
Feedback to guys on what was done by their leader and big thank too. Writing this up (very simply) on the area white board so its visual and can prompt more thinking across the day/week
Serious near misses and the learnings are also tabled at the GM meeting with alot of positive feedback to the GM from MD/Safety Manager. Supevisors also given alot positive feedback on reporting them through.
Our new worker interactions(conversations) by each leader are also picking up some.
Agree with the about we have multiple methods - whiteboard, via toolboxes, suggestion box, worker interactions, md and board tours, during safety workshops.
One thing I want to try is for the person (if they are brave enough) who reported it to toolbox the learnings to their team and/or create a video clip share across the sites.

It is always good to have a review of the incidents in health and safety meetings whereby you involve the staff and allow them to determine what they deem to be near misses or actual incidents. It creates positive engagement, aswell as a training/information session.

There was an actual ncident - that issue has already been determined by the fact it was observed and reported.

The only issue for your meeting is a discussion on the realistic potential harm that might have arisen. That will keep them busy until the scones arrive.

In the meantime if the incident had potentially bad consequence you would expect the business managers to get on and fix the matters before it got to some staff meeting.

Andrew, my comments were more based around staff key learnings and engagement in H&S meetings. There have been a few occasions where I have had to explain how we determined it was a near miss or an actual incident. Yes I would expect the potentially bad consequence to have been sorted as quickly as possibly and well before the scones arrived.

well explained !