>Can it be done without creating a view?

You can create an index but it should not be added to the structural cdx. If you do that, you will get an error whenever you open one of the tables without the other one.

If you can live with creating this index when the form launches etc. then you would (in pseudofox)

select employees
set a relation from incidents to employees.
index on employees.emp_name to caution.idx compact

I couldn't live with such a performance hit, so I'd use a view or SPT and index the resulting cursor by employee name.