Most of you have already heard the saying, “time equals money,” and perhaps some of you are a bit tired of it by now. However, the time and money spent on fixing damages inside a company’s facilities can be avoided if every employee is engaged in making instant incident reports whenever they spot damages or malfunctions.
If you’re in a rush, you can skip to the end to get the free case study and learn how another 5-star hotel uses our incident reporting tool incy.io for its security management.
Let's take a fictional example; meet a Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) Manager. Let’s call him Calvin. Calvin is an HSE Manager in a big national hotel chain. Calvin has a small team of 15 people that he works with daily. The 15 people consist of facility managers in each of the hotels in the chain.
On a daily basis, Calvin and his team ensure that the hotels in the chain stay in compliance with the hotel’s HSE regulations, as well as the official regulations provided by the government. Calvin and his team perform incident inspections once a week. After the inspections are over, Calvin collects all the data from the hotels in an Excel sheet and starts making statistics, graphs, and reports on the incidents reported. He does this manually.
Calvin often spends many hours reporting and reviewing the incidents, and he recently noticed that over half of his working hours is spent doing this. This gives him less time to handle other responsibilities.
He also realised that the reports rarely cover smaller damages in the hotels, as his safety team sees these of minor importance. The case Calvin was faced with is described below.
The case in brief: One of the hotels had a mould infestation, which was the result of leaky pipes in several of the rooms. Initially, the pipes were fixed every time they started leaking in the rooms. The facility manager didn’t realise that the pipes were also leaking inside the walls of the hotel.
Calvin later learned that guests had frequently notified the receptionist of the issue and that one housekeeper had gone on sick leave because she had an allergic reaction to the mould.
This episode ended up costing the hotel chain a lot of money, as it not only had to cover the mould and pipe removal and renovation of the hotel, but also check all the other hotels for pipe problems and mould, cover the expenses for the sick housekeeper, and pay the salaries of the employees who couldn’t work during the mould and pipes removal.
This episode could have been avoided if all employees who interacted with the guests or the rooms of the hotel would have been able to report the incidents themselves and if the reports had gone to Calvin directly via email. That would have allowed Calvin to take action sooner.
After the episode: Calvin called for a meeting with the executive board where he outlined an action plan to engage all employees to perform incident reports through a smart reporting system they would be able to access on their phones. In this way, Calvin and his team could take action when needed. Calvin predicted that this system would save the hotel money in the long run, and he would be able to prioritise his time to other responsibilities in his job description.
The board granted Calvin permission to implement his solution.
A year later, we meet Calvin again. Calvin could tell that the hotel had never run better. Since the implementation of the solution, the number of reported incidents more than doubled, with 80% of the employees actively reporting small damages that they found during their daily working hours. The amount of money spent on repairs has dropped significantly, and the hotel is making more money than ever.
Calvin’s 3 P’s for good HSE Management in any company and industry:
1. People first!
Always consider the health, environment, and safety of the people who interact with your business, whether they are employees, customers, or just visitors. Make sure that your facilities are safe and up to health standards. That way, no one can get injured and get health related issues from spending time in the facility. When you do this, your employees are happy and the customers have a good experience at the facility.
2. Proactively enforce an HSE culture for the whole organisation!
It is important that everyone knows that there are certain standards to be met and maintained in HSE and that it’s not only the responsibility of the HSE Manager and facility management staff to be on top of them. By creating an HSE culture, you engage everyone to feel ownership of the people inside of the facility and the facility itself. They will understand that this is necessary to stay healthy and employed.
3. Put a “Work Smarter Not Harder” policy in place
Because your time is important, make sure that you have a solution that can help you make the best use of your time so that you can act on problems as they arise. In that way, you can end up saving your company a lot of money and boost efficiency and internal communications in the organisation.
Calvin’s story is just one of many where small damages became much more harmful due to the lack of proper action. This story doesn’t just apply to hotels but to any industry where field inspections and incident reports are conducted. With the incident reporting system Calvin and his team also implemented the core strategy from VUCA. Read more about the strategy term in VUCA- The Beginning.
Incident reporting is one of the core competencies of our company. Don't hesitate contacting us - we're here for you.
Incident reporting tools have many assets. If you want an example of a company that implemented an incident reporting tool, learn how an unrelated 5-star hotel uses it for security management by reading the Kämp Collection Hotels Case Study today.
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.
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