Are Accidents and Incidents Being Investigated Thoroughly Enough?

Companies and their senior employees know that it’s important to investigate accidents or incidents in the workplace. There are many benefits to having a strong safety culture in the workplace, not least because it’s a legal requirement to carry out risk assessments and investigations. There are many benefits to investigating accidents and incidents, not least to meet your legal obligations in looking after the health and safety of staff, but to address the causes that lead to the incident.  

Yet, we need to ask the question: are these accidents and incidents being investigated thoroughly enough? To run through the tick boxes to get the report off your desk is one thing, but are we dedicating enough time and resources to fully understand the causes, or are we rushing through the process, leaving significant underlying issues unresolved?

The Managerial Dilemma: Time

Managers usually have never-ending job descriptions – and health and safety duties often fall within their remit. Managers tend to be responsible for overseeing multiple aspects of operations. They must ensure their team is working well and targets are being met. They have to report upwards and enact policy from their seniors. And they also have their own duties to attend to within their role.

Understandably, their schedules are often packed. And when it comes to health and safety, there can be a tendency to race through it to win back some time.

If you’re snowed under with work and an accident occurs, it may be tempting to conduct a quick investigation, identify the most obvious cause, the immediate cause, and move on. Task complete, and move onto the next thing on your to-do list.

However, in doing so, many managers only begin to scratch the surface of the problem and fail to dig deeper into the underlying causes that led to the incident in the first place. This may mean that another accident may well happen from these ‘underlying causes’, leading to another time-consuming investigation taking place. 

By attempting to save time in the short-term, managers may find their actions bite them back in the future by requiring more time of them, not to mention the potentially severe implications of any accident occurring in the workplace.

Quick to Investigate, Quick to Blame

Quick investigations can often result in what’s known as a blame-based solution. When we rush through things, whether because we’re pressed for time or we don’t want to allocate the task the necessary attention, we tend to gravitate towards the easiest solution. In the case of accident investigations, the easiest solution is to point to the immediate cause.

To have a clearer understanding, let’s take a look at a potential electric shock incident on a construction site. A worker receives an electric shock while using a power tool on a construction site. The investigation swiftly concludes the worker to be at fault as they failed to inspect the tool before use, which was against the company’s safety policy.

Later in the article, we will delve deeper into the distinction between immediate and root causes, but in this instance, a more thorough investigation may have concluded that the real, root, cause was poor safety management and a lack of effective safety training. The worker didn’t inspect the tool, but the company had no formal tool maintenance or inspection program. At the company, safety briefings were rushed and inconsistent. The root cause was the organisation’s failure to implement proper training and safety procedures. If this was dealt with, you might be able to stop the problem at its source.

Moving our focus back to blame-based solutions, we can see it often entails pinning the fault on a person or an isolated event. While this might seem like a resolution, it rarely addresses the broader issues within an organisation. As we saw above, blaming an individual for not following protocol doesn’t explain why the protocol wasn’t being followed in the first place. Was there proper training? Was the protocol realistic and achievable? Was it effectively communicated?

It is easier to opt for a quick, blame-based solution as it swiftly concludes the investigation with a tangible thing to point your finger at. Also, it may be easier to come to these blame-based solutions as, if you dig further beneath the surface, you may find out some hard truths about management or the company.

Ultimately, without addressing these questions, organisations might find themselves in a cycle of repeat further incidents, blaming individuals rather than tackling systemic issues.

Exploring Multiple Causes in an Investigation

As we sought to demonstrate above, to truly understand why an accident occurred, you need to look beyond immediate causes.

Incidents are typically the result of multiple contributing factors, which can be grouped into three categories:

Immediate Causes: These are the most obvious and often the easiest to identify. They are the actions or conditions that directly led to the incident, such as a wet floor causing a slip.

Underlying Causes: These are the less visible factors that contribute to the immediate cause, such as inadequate maintenance leading to the wet floor or poor signage warning of hazards.

Root Causes: These are often organisational or management issues that allowed the underlying causes to exist. For instance, was there a lack of regular inspections, or were safety procedures poorly implemented?

In the example of the electric shock incident, we saw that there were multiple causes, ranging from the immediate action of the worker, underlying causes such as rushed and inconsistent safety briefings, and the root cause of the organisation ultimately failing to implement proper training and safety procedures.

We can explore different examples to see the range of causes, and whether they fall into immediate, underlying or root causes.

Determining the Root Causes

When we take the time and care to investigate accidents thoroughly, we can go beyond the immediate causes and look for a longer-term solution by identifying the root causes.

In the previous example, we have found that organisational and management issues tend to be the root cause. While it’s easy to identify the error of an employee, you may find the error resulted from a combination of factors at the organisational and managerial level. 

This could include poor communication of safety protocols, inadequate employee training, insufficient resources allocated to safety measures, or lack of management oversight or involvement in safety initiatives.

Focusing on root causes is crucial because it allows us to recognise and address the systemic issues leading to not only the accident being investigated, but potentially of seemingly unrelated accidents. They may have different immediate causes, but a thorough investigation can reveal they share the same root cause. 

Time and Analysis Are Key

Workplace accidents are a reality, but how we respond to them makes all the difference. By resisting the urge to conduct quick, blame-based investigations and instead focusing on the root causes, we can improve safety standards, prevent future incidents, and foster a stronger safety culture. 

To identify these holistic and systemic issues, we must spend more time on thorough investigations and deeper analysis of each incident. It will require extra effort, care, and resources, but the long-term benefits are worth it. By investing time into investigations, companies will improve both their safety protocols and their organisational and managerial practices.