Stopping Minor Incidents from Becoming Major Workplace Crises
Standardize safety reporting and leverage data-driven insights to catch early warning signs and prevent routine workplace hazards from escalating.
Occupational health and workplace safety issues are fast becoming the target of management automation. This comes as leaders try to standardize measurement, reporting and better understand incidents that can happen across their workplaces.
From sprawling retail environments to the future of automated warehouses or traditional heavy-labor environments, centralizing the accident book, understanding the root cause of incidents and tracking near-misses as a facet of occupational health.
From the basics of workplace safety to hazard communications and safety metrics and audits, every business should be focused on creating a framework to improve their reporting and understanding of potential danger points. In doing so, they can ensure worker safety and minimize accidents.
1. Addressing Safety and Incident Management Needs
As with many business processes, the standard solution is to develop a framework using software that measures, captures and reports on incidents.
By creating a new cross-departmental team to focus on the safety issue or using existing HR resources, businesses can create a clear reporting structure. One that codifies every incident from “nuisance”, “near miss”, “impacting business” up to “potential disaster, for example.
The language of reporting can change from ad hoc complaints to better relate to business processes, outcomes and personal impact. This approach can help highlight the need for improved safety equipment, staff training or monitoring systems to improve safety and business operations.
Benefits of this data-led approach include:
- Early, lower-level, warning signs that are noted and reported, rather than ignored
- A structured approach creating standardized reports and documentation that can support business changes and compliance reporting
- Improved communication that makes it easier to highlight problems up and down the business
- Changes in safety that can be led by evidence and reasoning, rather than “just because management says so.”
2. Using Software and Technology to Support Incident Management
Software as a service supports most business operations across departments, from CRM to ERP and supply chain management. Within IT, incident management software (IMS) is increasingly popular as a method to track and deliver process improvements when it comes to safety and compliance, with a deeper impact on training and wellbeing.
Software can take traditional forms and replace free-text explanations with specific categories to classify incidents, making the information more relevant to the business and creating data for analysis. That data supports situational awareness, helping highlight poor processes, training or unclear advice to workers.
IMS gives organizations of any size the controls and processes to plan, coordinate and streamline their reporting and response efforts. From everyday safety to crisis and emergency response, software can prevent accidents and minimize the negative consequences of an incident.
Every business should have a crisis playbook, one that is accessible across the organization. The playbook can be created based on data and insights found in typical incidents, and planning for black swan events during planning sessions. The team creating it can also take on board lessons from any previous incidents or those of competitors in your market.
Identifying any operational or environmental crisis, responses to changing global events or just the typical fire or other emergency, creates a playbook that everyone can access to see how they help the company restore normal operations as soon as possible.
At the cutting edge of incident management, AI-powered camera systems can watch every step across a work floor, production process, warehouse or similar environment. The system can highlight staff or agency workers who are not wearing appropriate PPE. It can also alert management to workers not following procedures or working too close to dangerous environments.
This level of data provides evidence-based feedback for workers to create the ground rules for better on-site behavior and training.
3. Reacting to Incident Management Events and Data
As IMS and team reports provide greater clarity into safety across the business, managers and owners can react as part of an ongoing effort to improve safety, rather than reacting to individual events.
As insights become apparent from the data, training can be updated, processes changed and new equipment acquired where necessary. Doing so improves safety and prevents small incidents from becoming major ones, with expensive insurance claims and negative goodwill to the business.
4. Standardizing Work and workflows for Safer, More Predictable Outcomes
Standardized workflows ensure all staff are aligned with the same accurate guidelines. This results in fewer cases of people thinking they know better or claiming not to have understood the rules.
And, when a major incident does occur, everyone knows their place in the disaster response or other playbook. This can help the business recover as quickly as possible.
Through a strategic lens, root cause analysis and reviews into systemic and human factors can help deliver corrective and preventative actions, resolving not just one issue, but ensuring similar ones should never happen again.
5. Using Incident Management Software to Help Teams Work Safer
Throughout business, as workers become more aware of safety and a risk-averse culture, they can add their insights. By reporting unsafe situations, locations and teams where knowledge is lacking, situations that can create an incident can be mitigated.
This type of safety engagement, compliance awareness and risk management leads to a culture where people won’t be afraid to speak out and will understand that learning new, safer behavior is a benefit for individuals and the business.
And as compliance rules and regulations grow, workers expect safety in increasingly high-pressure or technology-led situations. Software and reporting can help HR keep pace with these changes to ensure business processes, targets and outputs are fit for purpose in an increasingly automated world.