Why (Some of) Your Team Hates Doing Root Cause Analysis — and What to Do About It

Every reliability leader eventually faces the same problem: your team resists doing Root Cause Analysis (RCA). You’ve invested in RCA training, created templates, maybe even set completion targets—but still, RCAs drag, engagement is low, and the outcomes feel hollow.

The truth is simple: most teams don’t hate Root Cause Analysis. They hate how it’s implemented.

At its best, RCA is an energizing, collaborative process—a chance for engineers, operators, and maintenance professionals to learn, innovate, and prevent recurrence. At its worst, it’s a time sink wrapped in bureaucracy, producing long reports that no one reads and actions that no one owns. 

Understanding why that happens is the first step to turning your RCA program around.

1. RCA Has Become a Blame Game

When RCA is introduced primarily as a postmortem—after something breaks, someone gets hurt, or production stops—it carries emotional weight. People walk into the room defensive. The language shifts from “What happened?” to “Who caused it?”

In a blame-heavy culture, participation becomes self-protection. Engineers and operators quickly learn to give safe, surface-level answers that avoid finger-pointing. The result: the team stays in the realm of proximate causes (“The pump failed”) and never gets to systemic or latent ones (“The PM interval was extended because of production pressure”).

The Fix: Move RCA from reactive to proactive. Encourage learning RCAs—on near misses, process deviations, or repeat minor failures. When people see RCA as a tool for improvement instead of accountability, engagement changes overnight.

2. The Process Is Too Slow and Administrative

Many organizations still rely on PowerPoint decks, spreadsheets, and homegrown forms to conduct RCA. Each investigation becomes a manual effort to format charts, align text boxes, and email attachments. By the time the team finishes documenting one RCA, another failure has already occurred.

Even worse, RCAs drag on for weeks—or months. Meetings are scheduled, rescheduled, and lost in inbox threads. No one’s sure who owns the next step, or whether the analysis was ever completed. Months later, when leadership asks about the outcome, the answer is a familiar one: “I think we finished that one… but I’m not sure what came of it.”

That uncertainty kills credibility. A process meant to drive clarity instead generates confusion.

The Fix: Streamline the process with a purpose-built root cause analysis software solution. A modern RCA platform like EasyRCA allows teams to collaborate in real time, build clear logic trees, and export reports instantly. It eliminates the lag between meetings, centralizes documentation, and makes every RCA visible from start to close. What used to take weeks now takes days—and everyone knows exactly where things stand.

3. No One Sees the Impact

Ask your team what happens after they submit an RCA. Most will shrug. Corrective actions get logged somewhere, maybe even approved—but few ever circle back to verify completion or effectiveness.

When results aren’t visible, motivation fades. Why spend hours analyzing a failure if nothing changes? Over time, people start to see RCA as a paperwork exercise rather than a driver of reliability improvement.

The Fix: Close the loop. Track actions, tie them to measurable outcomes (downtime reduction, safety incidents avoided, cost savings), and communicate those results back to the team. When people see data that proves their RCA mattered, their attitude shifts from compliance to ownership.

EasyRCA helps reliability teams automate this process—connecting RCA results directly to KPIs and dashboards so leadership can see what’s working. Learn how EasyRCA drives accountability and measurable improvement.

4. The Program Feels Disconnected from Daily Operations

In many plants, RCA lives in its own silo—facilitated by a reliability engineer but invisible to production or maintenance leadership. Insights never flow into the CMMS, KPIs, or strategic reviews.

That isolation kills credibility. Operators don’t see how the findings affect their work, planners don’t get better PMs, and leadership never sees trends that could drive enterprise learning.

The Fix: Integrate RCA with your broader reliability ecosystem. The best programs link investigation data to work management systems, Power BI dashboards, and quarterly reliability reviews. This transforms individual RCAs into trend intelligence—helping leadership prioritize systemic improvements, not just fix the latest failure.

For example, in the Ash Grove Cement case study, leadership now uses quarterly RCA reviews to connect site-level data to enterprise strategy—ensuring every RCA contributes to performance improvement across 12 plants.

5. Analysts Feel Underprepared or Overwhelmed

Even seasoned engineers struggle when RCA expectations outpace training. Without a clear framework, facilitators rely on intuition, leading to inconsistent quality. Some dig too deep, others stop too soon. The result is a patchwork of investigations that leadership can’t compare or trust.

The Fix: Build confidence through structured, advanced root cause analysis training for reliability engineers. PROACT® RCA Training gives facilitators the skills and consistency to lead investigations effectively. Combine that with a guided workflow in EasyRCA and you create a system that supports both new and experienced analysts—making high-quality RCA standard across the organization.

6. Leadership Support Is Sporadic

Finally, the most demoralizing reason teams hate RCA: they feel like leadership doesn’t truly value it. Meetings get canceled, reports go unread, and completed RCAs gather digital dust. Without visible sponsorship, RCA becomes “extra work” instead of “the way we work.”

The Fix: Leadership must model the behavior they want to see. Set expectations for timely RCA completion, attend reviews, and ask about learnings, not just actions. More importantly, use RCA data to inform strategic decisions—budgets, maintenance priorities, and staffing.

Forward-thinking leaders are now holding structured RCA review meetings—like Quarterly Reliability Reviews—to evaluate RCA trends, verify action effectiveness, and sustain engagement across sites. When leaders act on RCA insights, they reinforce the message that analysis drives business value.

Turning Resistance into Engagement

RCA doesn’t fail because teams are lazy. It fails because the system around it is misaligned. People resist processes that waste time, feel punitive, or yield no results. But when the environment is right—when RCA is fast, visual, transparent, and connected to outcomes—engagement naturally follows.

That’s why leading manufacturers are rethinking how they conduct investigations. They’re using EasyRCA to shorten cycle times, standardize RCA methods across plants, and create a single source of truth for all investigations. They’re creating visibility into every active and completed RCA so nothing slips through the cracks. They’re holding quarterly reliability reviews to discuss trends, not just incidents.

RCA shouldn’t drag. It should drive.

Because in the end, your team doesn’t hate RCA—they just hate doing it the old way.

It’s time to fix that. Start streamlining your process at easyrca.com/engage.