Additional customizability in issues

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.

• Introduction of more flexibility in the questions asked with the ability to hide default questions or make their completion mandatory.
• Introduction of views/registers that will allow you to separate For instance, this would allow you to separate your hazard/near miss/incident reporting from suggestions, recognition categories.

“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