Industries > Human Services

Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human, a groundbreaking report that pushed the issue of medical errors into the public spotlight.

That we all make mistakes was certainly nothing new: Operational failures occur across all industries. But the impact of errors in the context of the health-care industry drew instant attention. Preventable medical errors resulting in injury cost the industry somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion a year, the report stated. Even more shockingly, by some measures the number of patient deaths attributed to operational failures annually in the United States equaled the crash of one fully loaded 747 airplane every one-and-a-half days.

For incident-reporting systems to fulfill their promise, employees must use the system to \"speak up\" when they encounter a problem. Managers receive additional value when reporters speak up constructively by offering suggestions that facilitate process improvement.Since then, much research has focused on the underuse of incident-reporting systems. After all, the thinking went, a system used to collect and report incidents will only help an organization learn from its mistakes and lead to better safety results—to the extent that employees report information that can be used for process improvement.

A Harvard research team recently set out to better understand what managers can do to encourage employees to speak up about problems, and to investigate how managers can encourage employees to offer solutions