I would like to have the ability to have more control over Issues. I love the fact that anyone can report and issue, even those that do not have an account, but we are running into some limitations with the feature. We would actually like to use it to support some of our programs such as “Safety Suggestions”, and our “Food Safety Spotlight”.
Safety Suggestions is exactly as it sounds. It’s a way that our employees are able to report potential safety issues that they experience in their areas, and what their ideas are for solving them. If a suggestion is deemed good enough to implement, then the employee receives a gift card as a way of giving thanks for promoting a safe environment.
Our Food Safety Spotlight is another employee incentive program, but this one revolves around food safety culture. In this program, members of the leadership team are encouraged to nominate employees that have done an exceptional job at ensuring the safety of the product. This may come in the form of realizing a foreign material rejection system is not functioning as intended, or a critical material is damaged in some way.
Currently these programs are being handled on paper and are prone to the team leader failing to fill out the form because they are having to find/print one, fill it out, and remember to turn it in. Additionally, these papers may be lost before they are reviewed at the next management meeting and therefore the employees good actions go unrecognized.
The way the issues feature is set up now, I can not change the way that issue fields are phrased and therefore it is forced to have a negative connotation associated with it and in the case of Safety Suggestions, where the employees fill it out without the help of the supervisor, they are more likely to be deterred from using the feature as a result.
The quick answer would be to use something like Microsoft forms for this kind of thing, but it would be great to really tie in everything site related into one system, rather than having to bounce around between tech solutions for everything.
Until Issues matures a bit, we’re not using it at all of our sites to replace paper programs. We do have a few sites pushing usage though.
One of our categories is “Praise.” We ask what was observed and who was observed. The only negativity we see is in first having to click “ + Issue” to report it, but they just know that is the feature to choose even though the good observation is not an “issue.”
We also have categories for continuous improvement (suggestions that don’t fit in the other categories), food safety/security issue, maintenance request, property damage, quality defect, safety hazard observation (someone could get hurt but was only an observed condition), and safety near miss (someone befell a hazard and almost got hurt).
Recently I had someone suggest we add more categories now that it is not limited to 10. We could potentially get specific like “glass and brittle plastics.” For more common type things, this could be useful, but if we want to roll up at a higher level, that would be more challenging. “Subcategories” might be more useful for that.
Many locations are using incentives (best idea that was implemented/corrected), most reported in a quarter, etc. to give out prizes and gift cards.
Hi Broc and Corey,
Still in review, we’re considering changing the name of “Issues” to “Observations”. Would this serve you better?
We’re looking at making some changes in this space that may also be helpful and I’d value your feedback on them.
“Observations” may be a more appropriate name that encompasses both good and bad things. You observed damage, you observed a safety hazard, you observed someone doing something good….
I just met with our company Safety Manager to show her the upcoming changes planned for Issues (reordering questions, requiring questions, asking the questions upfront during reporting), and we’re both really excited. It’s far from everything we want, but it’s enough that I’m hoping to convince her to push usage companywide. Currently just a few sites are trialing Issues.
It will be really important that we can perform good analytics companywide and by site, from high level categories, down to question responses. For example of high level: all safety hazard observations, continuous improvement, food safety/security issues, maintenance requests, praise, property damage, quality defects, safety near misses, and safety accidents. For example of subcategories: safety hazards may need to be broken down by forklift, slip/trip, chemical, lockout tagout. Or we may need to break them down by person who reported them. Breakdown could be done via subcategories, or we can simply utilize the question feature. However, we currently don’t have good methods to pull question responses out or breakdown in the new Analytics.
I have two other posts with my wish list for Issues:
Issues Notifications | Community (safetyculture.com)
Make Reporting Issues Faster and More Informing | Community (safetyculture.com)
Hi@Corey
I hope you don’t mind me adding my 2 cents.
I would think ‘Observations’ is also not the correct term, as it can be confused with Checklists, Inspections, Audits - maybe “Events” is a better suited name as this covers both Positive and Negative situations.
Until we can break out Incidents from Inspections (I believe this is in the roadmap), I feel people will always struggle with whatever name Issues becomes. The bigger problem for me, is that we use Issues primarily over inspections, and then link the Inspection to the Issue. What would be better would be a hard rule that a certain Issue Type can have the mandatory requirement for a certain Inspection Template that must be linked. We should be able to prevent an Inspection from being created from Templates screen, if we require this to be reported as an Issue in the first instance, however, this is not possible as the access settings are not powerful enough to do this. We often have users start an “investigation” from Templates, but they should have raised the Issue first, as this serves as our escalation process, whereas Inspections do not notify.
Best,
Gary
Can I add the title change to CARE - Changing Attitudes Risk Elimination Card/ Program.
We are using the issues for NEAR MISS REPORTING, so maybe just call it “Reporting”? Our techs in the field or whomever may scan the QR code are not concerned with what it’s called, and our safety director will adapt to whatever it is called. ;)
I agree that the name of it is not as important as the functionality. One big omission at the moment is that I can't create a "Ïssue” observation or event on an asset.
I have a sneaky feeling some of the restrictions are intentional to avoid using issues for inspections