It’s important that employees report incidents or safety concerns for a number of reasons; primarily so that employers can:
- understand when something has gone wrong and can learn from that incident
and - put in place measures to prevent it from happening again.
Employers want to avoid it happening to someone else, potentially with more severe consequences.
Please see the overview of the four types of safety report that can be made by employees in the aviation industry.
Some employees have a legal obligation under Occurrence Reporting legislation to report certain occurrences, only options 1 & 2 in the table meet these obligations.
Another key consideration is whether you trust your employer and if they have a “Just Culture”.
Everyone from front-line staff, line managers to senior management need to understand their “just culture” and internal reporting processes. Organisations should have clear reporting processes, organisation-wide communication and provide all staff with effective training. If staff feel reporting something that has resulted from their error or mistake is likely to lead to punishment, they are unlikely to speak up. Similarly, if they don’t receive feedback it’s easy to conclude the organisation isn’t interested in their report, so why bother reporting?
If trust is lost or reports aren’t acted upon staff may turn to reporting through the routes shown in lines 2, 3 or 4 in the table, avoiding direct contact with their employer and turning to outside agencies for help. However, as it can be seen in the table, even these alternatives all rely on some form of investigation by the employer in order to establish a root cause. That is why it is much better if staff report through the internal reporting system, allowing the employer the opportunity to investigate, therefore line 1 is the right choice, whilst the others are all alternatives because there is a problem somewhere, typically this might be a lack of trust in the organisations culture.
Reporting options and when to use them