The way I addressed this was to tell people that acceptable methods of reporting a near miss incident included speaking to me about it.  Then I would ask them questions, make notes if it was complex, and document it myself.  I documented these reports as entries in a spreadsheet and not as report forms.  That made incident recording and analysis easier for me too,  An incident report form was available to those who wished to use it (it was available through the intranet and had only about 5 questions).  If I received one of these I entered the details on the spreadsheet.

This will not be suited to every workplace though as some companies are very into recording everything in a consistent way and might not accept this approach.

If you are sticking with the incident form, bear in mind that some people do hate writing things down, perhaps because of literacy issues or dyslexia as well as a hatred of bureaucracy.  So you could offer to fill it in for them: you ask the questions, they tell you the answers, you write it down.

Originally Posted by: Self and Hasty

An employee came into the office from the warehouse to complain to the Ops Manager that somebody had put bolts on top of a box on the racking so that when the picker took the box from the shelf the bolts hit him on the head. He was more annoyed by the laziness of others who had left the bolts there AFTER the box had been transported to the location.

As there was no injury I offered him the incident/accident/near miss form because it had the potential to cause an injury. He then complained that he should have just kept his mouth shut and just got on with it... 

Eek! This is bad health and safety culture, where the reporting of incidents is seen as an unnecesary bureaucratic waste of time... 

I tried empathising with the employee, colloquially saying the form will help us monitor and make things safer for everybody, but I know in his head he was just grumbling 'jobsworth'...

Going forward how can I turn this around? I feel generally I'm making good progress and despite a bit of inital resistance I am generally being appreciated at all levels for the changes I'm bringing in to the companies... I just don't know how to keep people positive about annoyances like this.

Best practice might be to fill in a near miss form, but when that makes staff feel put-out or resentful of Health and Safety all together which in turn may/can/will lead to incidents not being reported at all... What is best?

Sounds like you have enough info to log a near miss report anyway. How about a safety tour of the wharehouse with the ops manager. Take the bolts with you and engage with the staff, show them the bolts and talk to them about the issue. Doesnt  need to be a witch hunt justm make sure everyone is aware

Originally Posted by: Self and Hasty

Eek! This is bad health and safety culture, where the reporting of incidents is seen as an unnecesary bureaucratic waste of time... 

I tried empathising with the employee, colloquially saying the form will help us monitor and make things safer for everybody, but I know in his head he was just grumbling 'jobsworth'...

Two things, firstly you labelled this "bad health and safety culture".  So why the term "health and safety culture", do they have a "good productivity culture", "good financial culture", "good HR Culture" and just a bad safety culture.... or just a culture that impacts things like safety (it might also impact other things like, lost inventory, high rates of rework, poor product/service quality, headcount tunrover not just safety).  You could spin it that way to the leadership on site to help get them on board more.

Secondly you have been given two pieces of information from the employee, 1) the hazard and 2) they feel the system is bureaucratic.  So point 1 at least they care enough to tell someone about it, they are probably loads of things that are annoyances to them and now they nearly got hurt they are looking for help which to them is more important that filling in paperwork.  If you set aside 30mins with a group of them you will likley find out many more things like this and you can start putting together a plan with them to improve, and that way then have been engaged in improvment plans and have come up with the actions themselves rather than having them pushed on them

Point 2 I think if you know there is an issue you will want to help regardless of if they fill a form in or not so maybe the best approach is to do it that way and document it yourself.  If you want to get people to move in a certain direction you need to remove the barriers that get in the way of that.  I think they have given you a clear signal of what they see as barriers and their perception of the safety function is so now you have a really great opportunity to change that and learn more about how the work is being done (even when nothing bad happens).