The term ‘Near Misses’ should be banned!
If you google ‘near misses in health and safety’ you get 169 million hits. Scrolling through the first few pages, every post seems to be in support of reporting a near miss.
There are also a lot of entries covering how to get workers to report near misses and the challenges employers have in this space. I would agree with that as we have seen the same with our clients.
Why is it so difficult?
For those who know us, you will hear us talk about changing the language in health & safety (H&S). Aside from us folk who actually get super exited by this, most people do not find H&S sexy.
If you want proof of this, why not try this social experiment. On a Friday night, go to the pub, walk up to a group of strangers and introduce yourself – “Hi, my name is Marty and I do health & safety”. Hello? Where did everyone go?
I digress. I am not so sure that the term Near Miss is best suited to capture what we want.
Let’s look at this practically. A near miss… the term underscores vulnerability. We avoided failure or we nearly failed. By admitting to a near miss we are suggesting we had made a mistake and were just lucky it did not eventuate.
Although this may be factually correct, it is hardly encouraging our workers to report it though, is it?
Psychological safety is something we need to embrace in this regard. What this means is the belief that we won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
What are our alternatives?
Change the language. Yes, that is as simple as it gets. Change the language so that we focus on the event not the person.
We have different clients use different terminology, all having similar positive results. Words used to replace Near Miss include Safety Moments, Safety Observations, or New Hazards.
I would not recommend using terms like close call, close shave, narrow escape, near hit, near thing, tight squeeze, etc. These still focus on the person not the situation.
Another shift in terminology is the move from using the term accidents and replace this with incidents. An incident by definition captures a greater scope of scenarios which just happen to include ‘near misses’.
You may think this is all semantics… and yes, you are totally right. It is. That’s the beauty and simplicity of this. After all, our aim is to get information the best way we can and if all it takes is changing the labelling then why not?
