How Full Story Reviews Work

Traditionally, finding out what is really going on around safety at work was complicated, slow or often a bit hit and miss. 

PeopleSafe helps resolve this problem by providing you with tools that direct you to take the right actions around safety. Story Reviews are one of these tools.  When a Full Story is told a Story Review Task is auto-generated. This means someone in the organisation will be tasked to review that Story and take some action if needed. 

Contents  

1. Why do a Review? 
2. What are the steps in the Review Process?
3. Who gets involved in a Review ?
4. What are the keys to a successful Review?
5. How do I go about reviewing a story and why are details so important?
6. More about Story Reviews

Full Story Reviews 

Why do a  Review?

Once a full story has been told, a Review is the best endeavour to have the most accurate and fullest story recorded. It's the opportunity  to find out "What's really going on here?" People see and remember different things. It's important to record all perspectives of a story and it's OK if explanations of what happened don't match.  It's not about being perfect but about having a clear picture of what went on. When all the details are known you have the best chance to work out what needs to be done to make work safer.  

The Review Process has several goals:

• To ask more questions to help you do a thorough investigation of the story. 
• To check that the details of the story are correct and make any changes as updated information comes to light. 
• To add more details that were unavailable at the time the story was told.  
• Fix up any spelling mistakes!  
• Identify any risks that were part of the story that were not considered (both new risks and risks you know about). 
• Formulate new Safety Plans or update existing ones
• Look at the overall causes of the story, and consider any business changes that may need to happen because of new learning.

What are the steps in the Review Process?

There are a number of steps to the Story Review process    

1.        An internal decision is made in the business as to who will do Story Reviews.  
2.       The Review Process is completed within PeopleSafe.
3.        Any commitments or actions are added as Tasks (these are then tracked as part of the story). How to add a Task linked to a Story Record
4.        Automatic alerts are created in PeopleSafe depending on the content of the review.
5.        The story is automatically given a number and the Review Task is completed. 
6.        Any actions committed to, need to be followed up by your internally appointed person.
7.        Any newly identified risks need to be reviewed considering the detail of the  story.
8.        Any risks that were known about and had Safety Plans to control them, are reviewed to determine if any additional actions are needed to improve the control.
9.        Any people that were injured as part of the story need to be looked after and supported.
10.        Feedback on results of the review and any changes needed, to be given to workers. 

Who gets involved in a Review?

Your business will have decided when setting up PeopleSafe who is responsible for reviewing stories. The size of your organisation will usually determine how many people have this role. It may be a Manager or PeopleSafe Coordinator. Anyone reviewing stories must have the delegated authority of the business.

The reviewer will also need help from the worker telling the story and anyone else who was involved or who needs to be consulted about the story. 

What are the keys for a successful Review?

• Know your internal review processes on who does Story Reviews. 
• The right people involved with the review; access to the people who were involved in the story.
• The time available to complete a review in one go. 
•  Any additional information ( ACC forms, Doctors certificates, etc)

How do I go about reviewing a story and why are the details so important?

A Story Review involves working through a series of questions. PeopleSafe encourages good safety practices and so will ask you questions that will make it more likely that you are having the right conversations around the stories that happen. In the first screen your answers will determine the questions that follow, specifically around risks.  The rest of the questions will already be populated by what has been told in the story. The Reviewer's role here is to fact check & in some cases provide detail that would only be available after the story has been told. This will likely require you to ask further questions of the worker and anyone else involved to ensure you have a robust record of the story.  If Bob fell over and got  'HURT', it's very important to find out what caused Bob to fall. 

PeopleSafe asks specific questions that are designed to help you meet the requirements under the law . eg  Early identification of seriousness. During the review process you may escalate the story eg you may find the story now meets the notifiable injury standard.  

Note: PeopleSafe does not provide additional alerts at this point and expects the reviewer to take action.  

More about Story Reviews 

• Story types (Damage, Accident, Vehicle Crash)  in PeopleSafe are fixed and cannot be changed by the end user, ie the Reviewer. This mean that anyone using PeopleSafe uses the same language, and the story types are used to reduce the complexity for workers. They are not intended to be used as a perfect statistical measure of what has happened.
  As soon as you start looking to get extremely detailed around high level numbers you move into Bad Safety Strategy territory.  This is primarily because a story may contain multiple story types, eg where someone is hurt and breaks something because of threatening behaviour that also identifies a risk. It means that you have to choose one option to be used for statistical purposes and it becomes impossible to rank these sensibly.
• Do I need to follow the Tell Your Story Review process for every safety story that happens? The intention of the PeopleSafe story workflow is to provide a clear structure for dealing with work issues that arise where you think they are more than trivial.  Deciding whether to use the Tell your Story process see When to use Tell Full Story
• The Tell Your Story process will help you achieve good safety in your business in several ways. It will help you to find out “What’s really going on here” and to identify any new or un-controlled BIG risks.  You can now  monitor any new stories for controls that might not be working and it is used to provide a way for workers to engage and participate in good safety improvement processes.