Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

You’ve probably heard that old saying. Maybe close doesn’t count for most people. But for those of us in the world of workplace safety, close does count. A lot. The close I’m talking about is the “close call” or near miss. Let’s talk about why it’s so important and what we can do to take advantage of it.

The Significance of a Near Miss

Safety professionals in manufacturing and other industries do their best. But they’re human like everybody else. And so are the people they work with and depend on. Flawed people produced flawed programs. What that means is that every safety program has some flaw somewhere. The important thing is to figure out where the flaws are and fix them. Unfortunately, it usually takes an incident to find the flaws.

But not all incidents injure people and damage property. The incidents where nobody or nothing gets hurt are called “close calls” or “near misses.” A near miss incident is thus a “free shot” to identify and fix problems in a safety program before they do actual damage. It could be anything from someone walking in an aisle and almost getting hit by an opening door to a screwdriver being dropped to the floor by the maintenance guy working on a ladder and narrowly missing the skull of a maintenance worker below. Incidents like this happen all the time.

Why We Don’t Take Advantage of Near Misses

The problem is that near misses are the Rodney Dangerfield of the safety world. “They don’t get no respect.”

One of the reasons for this lack of respect is the tendency to confuse compliance for safety. The OSHA recordkeeping regulations require us to record and report all occupational injuries and illnesses in the workplace. But the recordkeeping requirements don’t cover near misses. And if we don’t have to report those near misses that we see happen everywhere, we tend not to pay them any attention. No harm, no foul.

So let’s say a worker almost gets hit by a falling box. The safety director might take the following view: “Wow, that was a close one! Thankfully, there was no injury, no first aid, no lost or restricted time. I almost had a boatload of paperwork, investigation, corrective action and training to do on that one.”

Respect the Near Miss

Of course, that is a terrible mistake. The truth is that neglect of near misses is a missed opportunity for prevention and a recipe for future accidents. The fact that nobody got hurt or no machinery got damaged was an accident. What’s important to realize is that something went wrong and it could go wrong again. So you need to fix the problem because the next time you might not be so lucky. And you need to be grateful the near miss happened because it gave you the chance to prevent an injury.

Doing Something about Near Misses

You may say that there’s no way to address near misses since you don’t know when they occur. After all, you can’t be everywhere to see them happen. And you can’t necessarily count on workers to report them.

Not knowing about near misses is a real problem. I’m not so naive to believe that all of the near misses that happen on the shop floor will get recognized and reported. But there are steps you can take to make it more likely for near misses to get reported. Establishing a safety conscious attitude throughout the company and explaining the importance of near misses will go a long way toward getting people on the floor to recognize and report them.

I know that that’s easier said than done and that for many of us this may be the biggest challenge in establishing an effective safety program. This is especially true if your plant has that sports locker room code of “what happens in the shop stays in the shop.” But this is where the safety director can really make a difference. A good safety director can change that mentality. So there’s your challenge: Go out and create that work environment atmosphere that has workers thinking safety every day, be visible, accessible, active and relentless; listen to your workers and use everyone as a resource.

Conclusion

The next time you get a call from one of your supervisors, foremen, lead persons or operators on the shop floor asking you to come and look at a potential problem, don’t think – great, here comes a load of $*#^$%#@!! paperwork. Instead, think– hey, my safety program is working. They’re telling me about a problem and giving me a chance to fix it before it does real damage. If they’re doing something right, I must be doing something right. And, if we’re all doing something right, we must be on our way to a safer and healthier workplace.

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