It’s January: Time to Make RCA Resolutions
Now that we are firmly in the New Year, everyone is flooding back into their workplaces from the holidays with personal resolutions on their minds. But has your workplace considered what resolutions it should implement for the New Year?
Here’s a few ideas you can implement to improve your investigations in 2026, and make your workplace the safest it has ever been:
Prioritize Diverse Expertise
One of the best ways you can boost the effectiveness of your investigations is by including diverse types of expertise in the process. Having experts in only a few fields on your team practically guarantees that the “root causes” they find will be within the context of those fields.
This means that they might overlook the questions necessary to find other root causes. Keeping the expertise on your investigative team diverse and thorough, or using a RCA system that utilizes a diverse spectrum of questions such as TapRooT®, can help your investigations to get straight to the real root causes every time.
Plan Proactively
Many people in the safety field see RCA as a reactive process meant to be enacted once a disaster has occurred. Proactive RCA, however, helps companies to identify potential problems and system weak-spots before they become dangerous, saving time, money, and lives in the long run.
You can enact even more proactive planning by preparing for an investigation or problem ahead of time. Making an investigation kit, keeping necessary materials accessible, and prioritizing good communication between employees and leadership can all make your workplace well prepared when mistakes inevitably happen.
Craft Human-Friendly Systems
Human performance is an extremely important and often overlooked aspect of good RCA. If you want to prevent mistakes from reoccurring, the problem to solve is not the people who made them, but the systems they operate within.
Attempting to solve people leads to corrective actions like retraining or discipline, which are not very effective long term. When you solve systems instead, making them more intuitive and human-friendly, the chances of a mistake happening in the first place are decreased significantly.
Eliminate Blame
Blame is rampant in bad investigations, and often keep people from finding real root causes. A person who makes a mistake rarely did it intentionally, or with malice, and they have a very personal understanding of the systemic issues that led them to make that mistake.
An investigation that dismisses these as “excuses” overlooks key evidence, and shows employees that witnessing a problem and bringing it up will be met with punishment, rather than understanding.
Foster a Culture of Trust
Once a blame culture is out of the way, there is room for a new type of company culture to grow: a culture of trust. If employees trust their leadership, root causes become much easier to find, because employees are able to be honest about the reasoning behind their mistakes without fear of repercussion. This gives an investigation access to more in-depth witness testimonies and more helpful interviews.
When a company fosters a culture of trust, they enable their employees to contribute to the systems they operate within. Systems built in a culture of trust don’t only become more comfortable for the employees, they become safer and more efficient.
We Are Here to Support You
If you want to add these resolutions to your company’s goals this year, TapRooT® RCA is here to help. These exact ideas are our specialties, and we would love to start talking to you about how you can implement them. If you’d like to have that conversation, contact us for a free briefing here.
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You can also watch our video on RCA Resolutions from the early days of the TapRooT® Podcast here.
