See Something That Could Have Hurt Someone? Report It.
Sometimes the most important safety information comes from the events where no one gets hurt.
A truck mirror almost clips another vehicle. A tool falls nearby but misses someone. A person slips, catches themselves, and keeps going. Equipment moves unexpectedly, but no one is in the line of fire.
These are the moments that are easy to shrug off because “nothing happened.” But something almost happened – and that matters.
GUC’s new Close Call Reporting process is now available to help capture those moments before they turn into injuries for the next person. This improvement came from an iLead Safety project and was designed to make reporting close calls easier, faster, and available to everyone.
A close call is a workplace event where an uncontrolled exposure did not result in injury but could have caused harm if the circumstances had been slightly different.
That includes near-miss vehicle events, such as almost striking another vehicle, nearly bumping mirrors, backing close to an object, or any other situation where contact or injury could have occurred but did not.
Close calls are often the warning signs we get before someone gets hurt. Safety research has shown that there may be an estimated 189 close calls for every lost-workday injury.
At GUC, we had eight lost-workday injuries between 2018 and 2025. Based on that benchmark, we would have expected well over 1,000 close calls during that same period, yet only 36 were formally reported.
That doesn’t mean team members weren’t seeing exposures. It likely means we were missing opportunities to capture them, learn from them, and correct them before an injury occurred.
Our new process changes that.
Previously, close calls were reported through SafeAlign’s Safety Contact system, with limited reporting access primarily to supervisors. With the old process, team members who didn’t have responsibility to conduct Safety Contacts didn’t have access to the “Close Call” form. Now, any team member can submit a Close Call report when they see something that needs attention, and reports may be submitted with your name or anonymously.
To report a close call, go to the Safety Portal on My.GUC.com, select SafeAlign, login with your GUC username and password, and then choose Close Call Reporting. QR codes will also be posted throughout our facilities.
Employees will also be able to review reported close calls to see what types of exposures are being identified across GUC. That means you can look at what is happening in other areas and ask, “Could that happen here?”
Close Call Reporting gives us the chance to fix the “almost” before it becomes the injury.
So, remember, every close call that gets reported is one more chance to protect each other before someone gets hurt.
- Submitted Kelly Smith, Safety Culture Specialist
