An estimated 2.3 million workers experience work-related injuries or deaths each year. Often, these are avoidable. Creating an organisational habit of incident reporting is essential to improving workplace safety.
In this post, we’ll be covering everything you need to know about reporting a workplace incident. This includes discussing the importance of incident reporting and a quick breakdown of how to make an incident report.
Incident reporting involves reporting any incidents that happen in the workplace – whether big or small. Often, employees will avoid reporting smaller incidents. They might fear being reprimanded or they may not believe the incident is important enough to report. Alternatively, they might not know how to report the incident.
However, reporting all incidents, no matter their size is important. The more incidents you report, the more data there is to analyse.
Reporting minor incidents can help alert the company that there is a problem somewhere. Then, they can put measures in place to prevent these incidents from recurring or snowballing into a more serious problem.
In addition, incident reporting encourages employees to be more involved in improving the safety culture at work. They will become more invested in work safety, considering ways to improve safety at work.
Additionally, reporting a minor incident is a lot cheaper and easier than dealing with a more serious incident that may otherwise occur.
To create a habit of incident reporting at the workplace, you need to overcome employees' reluctance to report these occurrences. One of the biggest obstacles in this regard is employees’ fear of being blamed or reprimanded for the incident by management.
To combat this, you want to empower your employees by ensuring that the consequences of their actions are fair and clearly understood. Focus on getting the message across that they will not be punished for reporting any incidents. Point out that their safety is your priority and the best way to ensure everyone has a safe place to work is to deal with incidents as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Another barrier to incident reporting is a lack of action on incidents that are reported. Employees become sceptical of the incident reporting process if they don’t see any action taken in response to their reports.
You should take action when employees report an incident, especially if it is an ongoing problem. This will help employees place their trust in the process, showing them that they are making a valuable contribution.
You must also be transparent about the action you take. It is no good taking action without showing the employee what was done. Moreover, if no action was necessary, explain why.
You want to entrench safety into your workplace culture. It should become part of employees’ workplace habits.
Change starts at the top. You should optimise, design and change operations and processes to improve safety at all levels of your organisation. Put appropriate measures and channels in place to facilitate a safety culture that everyone contributes to.
Incident reporting is essential for effective safety management in the workplace. For the reporting process to be successful, you need to lay down the groundwork to ensure it becomes a habit for employees.
One of the major challenges business owners face is getting their employees to report incidents. Employees could be reluctant to report incidents because of fear of persecution or rejection by management.
One way to deal with this issue is to ensure that all employees understand that there is accountability and consequences to their actions. It is also important to follow through and be transparent about outcomes.
At the end of the day, prevention is better than cure. So it is important to make sure that your workplace and work culture prioritises workers’ safety and wellbeing.
If your organisation is looking for a tool to involve all employees in safety reporting for better decision-making on workplace and safety strategies, have a look at the Falcony Platform. It enables your staff to participate in creating clarity on non-conformities, give feedback, ideas and input for the business, as well as preventing and decreasing the amount of friction in cross-team communications, and gather actionable data in the process.
Are you interested to check how it all works? Start a 30-Day FREE Trial to see how the Falcony | Platform can help your organisation.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.