If you’re running a business, you’ll already be aware of the importance of good health and safety practices. In fact, if you’re following the relevant rules and regulations on the matter, you’ll have a risk management policy in place that anticipates and prevents harm to your employees before it can occur.
However, we all know that despite our best efforts, incidents do happen – no process is entirely risk free. That’s why incident reporting is so important: reporting incidents and near-misses, and detailing the consequences suffered by employees and the business, teaches us vital lessons about our processes, and what needs improving.
But how can you do this effectively? Well, you can write down the details of incidents, or fill out forms before giving copies to the relevant people. However, what would be far better is to use technology to improve safety. After all, don’t you use technology in almost every other aspect of modern life?
Incident management reporting software helps businesses to keep track of incidents. But more importantly, it enables them to use that information to drive behavioural change so that processes become safer, and that businesses become more efficient and more profitable.
How do businesses do this? Well, by using reporting software, businesses are able to capture and track accidents and incidents as they occur. More significantly, it then allows analysis and investigation to be carried out, ensuring that the root cause of an incident is identified, and that plans are put in place and actions are taken to reduce the likelihood of harm occurring in future.
Technology like this is also helping to improve safety as it allows for scalability. Incident reporting (and learning lessons) is a challenge in medium to large sized businesses due to the fact that employee numbers are high, people are often spread across multiple locations and inevitably face an array of hazards – some of which are shared, and others which are completely unique to their processes and procedures.
Technology helps to address this problem, enabling key members of organisations to share information with each other wherever they are in the world, whatever their role. It also provides them with a good overview of what’s happening across the company, ensuring that the necessary people are notified of incidents, and that escalation occurs and action is taken to reduce the frequency and severity of future harm.
Incident reporting management software is available from providers such as Airsweb, so take some time to consider the benefits your business might receive by investing in this kind of technology. After all, it would be a shame to invest so much in developing a health and safety policy that only addresses one half of the picture – prevention – as opposed to learning from issues as they arise too.
If you’d like more information regarding incident reporting and want help learning how to use it to make your business a safer and more profitable one, take a look at this advice from The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. The Health and Safety Executive also have a great deal of information about incident reporting on their website.
