Friday Jokes

Friday Jokes are memes, videos, and anything funny! Tune in every week for another joke that may (or may not) relate to root cause analysis.

RIP ✌️😂

Rest in peace, burdensome paperwork. You won’t be missed!

We’ve all felt the dread of filling out redundant, unnecessary documentation. How can we manage this problem in the workplace?

Safety clutter is never malicious; every form was made with good intentions. An overbearing amount indicates there’s no system to optimize the current load.

With that being said, someone needs to investigate what can be cut or mitigated. That might seem obvious, but, clearly, no one has tried yet.

Sure, evaluating all your documents might be a big project. Doing so, however, can save your entire team lots of time and effort in the long run.

Consider the following optimizations:
• Are there overlapping fields to fill out?
• Are any fields not relevant to the document?
• Can similar forms be merged into one?
• Does the document need to exist at all?

You’ll likely need managerial involvement to implement these changes, so it’s important to collect and present evidence on how the paperwork has become overbearing.

Furthermore, it could be worthwhile to perform these evaluations proactively, rather than waiting until the clutter has become so burdensome that the team has resorted to pencil-whipping.

WHAM!

09/04/2026

Right when you’re back on track… WHAM! Another major incident!

Incidents investigations are often thrown onto the laps of teams with already limited resources. Here are a few tips to make them less painful.

📋 Develop a plan beforehand.

If you can’t realistically perform your normal tasks while conducting an investigation, consider which tasks can be reallocated prior to an incident.

This might require management involvement, so the sooner you develop a game-plan, the better understanding everyone has of the process.

🏃 Dedicate time to investigate proactively.

If there’s already time on your calendar to perform root cause analysis, a major incident will be less intrusive to your time.

Furthermore, major incidents are far less likely to occur if you take care of minor ones effectively.

🏋 Train, train, train!

It doesn’t matter how frequent your investigations are if you’re not looking outside your own scope of knowledge. No one should have to perform an incident investigation without proper training.

Um… 👀

08/28/2026

Well, uh… this is awkward. Who wants to tell management about the management root causes?

It’s not easy to dive into this topic, especially after a major incident, but it’s necessary if we want meaningful improvements.

For starters, lead by a blame-free example. Just as we expect our supervisors not to blame individual workers, we can’t point fingers at executive team members. Clearly establish that we need to fix management SYSTEM root causes, not specific managers.

Even still, the executive team might not like to hear that their baby is ugly. That’s why it’s important to always show your work. Cite your sources and present a clear outline of your investigation process. More evidence means a more convincing corrective action.

This is where I come to cry 🙂

08/21/2026

New hire training… How can we set strong expectations from Day 1?

First impressions matter. In fact, in psychology, we call this the Primacy Effect. It’s a cognitive shortcut where our brains disproportionately remember and weigh information we receive first over intel presented later.

If a new hire immediately sees colleagues taking shortcuts, for instance, that will have a lasting impact on what they perceive as acceptable. Inversely, if management is present for the hiring process, even for a simple handshake, they demonstrate care in that day-to-day operations.

That being said, it’s important to understand that you can’t hire and fire our way into a healthy work environment.

New employees become a part of the company culture whether you’re happy of its current state or not.

Even if the entire staff was somehow replaced, the newbies will eventually fall victim to the same system faults that facilitated the adverse behaviors in the first place: poor communication, lackluster enforcement, bad human engineering, et cetera.

So, if you have high expectations for your new hires, make sure your systems provide the tools to help everyone reach their goals.

I know what we have to do…

08/14/2026

Improvement can feel daunting, even impossible, in a stagnant work environment.

Incident investigators may feel discouraged when leadership is adverse to change, but there are important reasons to keep putting your best foot forward:

• Giving up doesn’t fix anything.

You know the umpteenth retraining session won’t fix the constant incidents.

Having your suggestions fall through is frustrating, but the problems at your workplace will get worse before they get better if they continue to be unaddressed.

• Safety is more than a checklist.

Remember what’s the stake: the safety and well-being of your team. Going the extra mile to improve your safety systems can save lives.

• There are tools at your disposal.

We’re here to help. TapRooT® RCA is designed to find and fix the generic problems roadblocking your company.

Improvement is never impossible. There are always solutions; it’s a matter of finding them.

Lacking substance

08/07/2026

CAPA: It’s great in theory, but it really lacks substance.

CAPA (Corrective Action, Preventative Action) is the concept of handling incidents both reactively and proactively. Action should be taken to handle the situation immediately, but safeguards also need to be added to prevent its reoccurrence.

That’s great, but CAPA provides little guidance on what effective corrective or preventative actions are.

Let’s say a worker violates a procedure, leading to a minor incident.

Discipline is a common corrective action when it comes to human error. Further investigation would reveal the procedures are confusing, the worker felt time-pressured, and there’s an unhealthy company culture.

In this case, discipline would result in frustration, not improvement.

To make matters worse, the preventative action is likely to fail, too, without any direction in human performance.

Often times, teams fall back to initiating retraining or expanding the procedures. Most investigators don’t have the experience to pinpoint or fix the underlying causes.

CAPA is a wonderful concept, but that’s all it is: a concept. It needs to be used alongside a robust investigation model to be used meaningfully.

Training

07/31/2026

Training is often overused as a root cause, especially considering it isn’t even one to begin with. It’s a basic root cause category that encompasses more specific systemic problems:

❌ No Training

If a task is failed because of a lack of training, yes, the worker needs to be trained. Moreover, the training policy needs to be further investigated.

Was the task analyzed? Did someone decide the worker could skip training? Was required training missed?

😵‍💫 Lack of Understanding

If a trained worker failed to understand the task, throwing them into an unchanged retraining session will not solve anything.

Were the lesson plans, learning objectives, and instructions comprehensive? Are workers given opportunities for practice and repetition for critical tasks?

🖼️ A Small Part of the Big Picture

Many teams jump straight into training because it’s familiar, cheap, and easy. Even though many root causes relate to training, it’s still a small piece of the puzzle.

It’s important for teams to treat every investigation comprehensively, or else workers will be stuck with retraining session after retraining session.

Expectation vs Reality

07/24/2026

Audit readiness is common for planned inspections. And it defeats the entire purpose.

It’s one thing to double check everything is in order before an inspection, but it’s a whole other story to lie about what the real day-to-day operations look like.

Before you decide to put on a dog and pony show, consider the following:

• Management will be out of the loop.

Some rules and policies are unrealistic in practice: the PPE is uncomfortable, the procedures take too long, the quota is impossible to reach without rushing.

Instead of pretending these issues don’t exist when someone is watching, be transparent with the inspector. Management can’t help if they don’t know the underlying problems at your facility.

• The more you cover up, the more things will spiral.

Even if you successfully manage to dupe your inspector, you’re setting your team up for failure. Expectations will grow over time, and window dressing will only take you so far.

Furthermore, lying creates a culture of dishonesty. If you set the precedent that it’s okay to fib to management, why should workers be transparent with you?

• Safety is more about audits and statistics.

In the heat of reaching certain TRIR goals, it might be tempting to skew the numbers. But this puts your team in danger.

Unaddressed safety problems will catch up to your team eventually. If you care about your coworkers, never lie about incidents at your facility.

Phew!

07/17/2026

We’ve all experienced the dread of giving a presentation during our schooldays… And many of us have realized that we have plenty more to host.

Public speaking is one of the most common fears in the world. How can we conquer this phobia? 😰

• Know that this isn’t about your speaking skills.

You don’t have to be an amazing speaker to give an insightful presentation, especially if your field is in QHSE. Take a deep breath and remember the point is to relay important information, not to grade your performance.

• Consider any rebuttals and questions.

When it comes to topics as important as incident investigations, you don’t want to look unprepared. You should have a comprehensive timeline of the events, capturing all relevant details.

The more evidence you collect, the less likely you are to be caught off guard later.

• Stay honest.

If you are hit with a question you don’t know the answer to, it might be tempting to exaggerate or assume some details. This defeats the purpose of your investigation. The whole point is to find and improve the system failures at play.

If you make information up, you’re sending your team on a goose hunt to fix your best guess. It’s okay to say “I don’t know” sometimes. That shows opportunities of improvement in the company’s auditing, record keeping, and investigation systems.

In conclusion, a strong presentation is the result of a robust investigation, not a charismatic speaker.

Bad Call

07/10/2026

“The employee wasn’t paying attention.”

No kidding, Sherlock.

With time being such an invaluable resource, many companies are weary to invest much of it into their incident investigations. But this mentality can have rippling effects on your company:

• Time is an investment.

Many teams make the mistake of rushing investigations to get operations back online as quickly as possible.

The problem is that surface-level findings lead to surface-level solutions. The root causes remain addressed, meaning the issue will pop up again eventually.

• Employees notice a lack of care.

If yet another investigation is concluded with a root cause of “human error” and a corrective action of “retraining”, that lack of effort sets a standard for your entire organization.

If management can’t take the time to ask why people are making mistakes, why should the workforce bother, either?

• Blame spreads like the plague.

No one wants to take accountability in a work culture that attempts to fix people instead of systems.

Stopping investigations at “human error” teaches workers that deflection, dishonesty, and distrust are necessary tools to use when they inevitably make a mistake.

Take a few extra moments to ask why the employee wasn’t paying attention. You may discover several opportunities for systemic improvement.