Agreed.
Especially where bullying is common.

Those signs send a mixed message about the aims of workplace safety and risk management. Not only is there an underlying suggestion that it's not OK to report, but somehow there is also an element of focusing overly much on failures rather than good work and contribution. They are helpful as a measure, but more useful in the background for managers to see what's happening.

They should be banned. There are so many reasons they are a bad idea.

Agreed - it is an example where real safety and corporate image diverge. It does not always have to be like this but often this is what happens. If only the deeper understanding of these sort of messages that many HSE professionals have could be communicated out to the populace so that we no longer see these signs.

I saw politically incorrect sign misappropriation that said 'This Work Centre has been accident-free. since... Joe left.'

It made me giggle.

For the record, no I'm not a fan of lagging indicator celebration. Yes, the site management needs to acknowledge that they hired, trained and supervised Joe, so they had a part in the problem

Using the presence of a negative to state a positive is flawed in this instance and lazy as you are not deep diving into success which should be the larger data set. Work complete without damage to plant or harm to people. You are only looking at when things go wrong...put simply no one looks at the "all blacks" because of their errors, mistakes or exceptions. They study one of the most successful teams in the world because of their success, culture and belief systems. It is also important to note that this is a harder, longer term journey and with 2-3 year managers in influential roles focussed only on short termism a harder journey still. What are your intended outcomes and where are they currently in the business "bright spots" then how can you replicate them...

I agree with your sentiments. It creates a reluctance to report incidents.

The most effective method of changing the negativity around reporting of accidents and incidents that I have seen was to simply tweak the terminology in the metric.

By changing the "Days since an Accident/NM" dashboard to "Days since a lesson learned", the focus of the reporting system immediately changed the perception on what reporting allows the business to do, and encouraged the workforce to look for opportunities for improvements, then working together to achieve them.

The other laggy stuff regarding, LTI's, AFRs, significant NMs, etc are still important and need to be monitored, but maybe not advertised as being more important than the leading stuff.

Unless you have a very large or very injury prone workforce most lag measure are not statistically significant. Reporting on a weekly or daily basis will give a false sense of security or panic.

LTIs show the ratio of injuries to person hours but do not show anything about the amount or type of work done. We have recently moved to measures around injuries in relation to varies services sold. Early days yet but it will be interesting to see that results.

The latest Safeguard Magazine included an excellent article based on a presentation at the Safeguard Conference, about the tendency of safety and other compliance disciplines to focus overly much on what is lacking rather than what is there. Most organisations these days are doing plenty of positive things toward ensuring a safe workplace, and it would be good to see them focusing on those in more visible ways, like signs and dashboards.

How about a "days since last safety improvement" sign? It has been zero days since there was a positive safety suggestion. It has been three days since the last near miss was reported. It has been a week since the last group wellness activity. It has been three weeks since the last H&S committee meeting. Focus on the lead indicators.

You may find these signs about as useful

https://www.amazon.com/Ninja-Pickle-Site-Safety-Velociraptor/dp/B07F9PB2JW

These are a no-no in my opinion, it sends the wrong signals and in a safety II world is not appropriate language. I do like the velociraptor signage that Michael recommends above, sets a positive and fun tone while getting the message across.

Have never been a fan of these signs as they show failures and focus on who is the next person to have an incident/accident. And management place to much emphasis on the numbers and not the reality.

Get rid of them quickly. One of the worst things you could have to measure safety performance.

Does anyone have any research to back up the claims that "...days since last..." signs are a deterrent to reporting of incidents?

My reason for asking this is most of the claims that this is the case seem to be based on intuition - "surely you wouldn't want to be the one to reset the clock to zero", but my personal experience with these signs when working in a non-safety specific role was they were mostly ignored and insignificant.

While I definitely would never recommend installing one, I also definitely wouldn't go on to say that they would cause a significant affect on non-reporting. There might be a correlation between sites with these signs and significant non-reporting rates, but I would bet on most cases that it would have to do with a hidden 3rd variable than direct causation.

Matt.

Always hard to prove a negative.

But I see a similarity in the Government insistence on (miss) reporting Covid positive results on a daily basis. After x days of community free transmission who wants to be the first person with a runny nose to be the one to test SARS-Cov2 positive. It was reported that in the Auckland cluster there was a delay in testng within one family due to the negative impact a result might have on the family. I havent seen any follow up of this.

Sadly I cannot speak of any real value of such statistics having experienced these in widespread use in the middle east where huge signs would pronounce to the world that there had been X million man hours since the last recorded or reported injury or incident. My experience of this is that it introduced a parallel line. As someone has already said who on earth would want to be the one to reset that gargantuan figure back to zero. Oh the guilt ! Thus no one would report anything for fear of being “that one” It’s not as if its of any real value as its past and cannot be changed, it just puts the fear of god up everyone. Its not what safety is about and certainly not influencing engagement or positive behavioural changes. The only real “evidence” I had of that would be not seeing someone in work and asking their workmates where so and so was and the reply was they were off sick or seeing a worker hobbling and saying an old injury or some such thing. Of course difficult to prove either way but on some of the sites I worked where the number of site workers are many thousands remember to err is human the balance of probabilities didn’t stack up.