Accidents and fatalities are an integral part of life. When it comes to workplaces, handling these incidents is often a challenge. This is where incident recording software comes in handy.
This type of software is gaining traction and has become an important tool for companies across the globe. This is because rather than assuming that workplace incidents can be avoided, progressive companies adopt incident management tools and use them to minimize incidents and prevent their recurrence.
Essentially, incident recording software enables businesses to think of ways to respond whenever an incident occurs. The initial response is often critical, but there are several other aspects that should be considered beyond that.
various ways that incident recording software can help companies keep workplaces safe
1. Generates Accurate Reports
Installing incident recording software, like EHS software, enables companies to receive accurate reports, which are generated by in-built analytics tools on a regular basis. By using different indicators, the software enables companies to access their overall workplace safety performance or determine how they’re performing in specific areas.
The software also makes it easy for businesses to generate customized reports whenever they wish to look into any metrics that relate to critical accidents or incidents.
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2. Responds To Crucial Questions
Businesses that develop incident recording software aren’t only able to keep tabs on the accidents or fatalities that occur in the workplace, but they’re also able to prepare and monitor misses too. This is because, with such software, companies can respond to questions that employees have concerning their safety at the workplace and how prepared the company they work for to handle such incidents.
Employees often need this information so that they’re aware of the steps that their employers have taken to comply with workplace safety requirements, helping reduce risks. By tracking their legal compliance, companies are able to cover themselves in case an incident occurs. This is particularly critical in industries where employees are exposed to high workplace risks, like power plants, oil and gas, construction, roads, and hazardous sectors.
3. Tracks Workplace Accidents
A workplace incident recording software plays a critical role in aiding investigations. Businesses that invest in such software are able to collect relevant data in a central location and take the necessary steps towards identifying preventive measures. One of the ways that the software achieves this is by tracking incidents.
Most incident recording software allows companies to track a wide range of workplace incidents, including fatalities, Workplace injuries, near misses, and environmental damage. With such software, companies get to store a wide range of files, data, documents, photos, and witness statements in central cloud-based storage. This makes the information easily accessible to everyone who works in the organization.
4. Identification Of Problem Areas
Workplace incident recording software makes it easy for businesses to identify problem areas in their work areas and even take note of repeat occurrences. By keeping tabs on the accidents that occur in the workplace from a central location, businesses can gather insights on the frequency of incidents and their causes.
Also, understanding high prone areas enables businesses to focus more on finding ways to solve accident triggers and put measures to reduce the risk of recurrence.
5. Makes Teams More Accountable
Workplace incident recording software enables companies to keep their teams accountable. When working as a health and safety manager, for instance, it’s virtually impossible to know and see what happens in every corner of a company. However, recording incidents as they happen in the workplace can go a long way in ensuring that evidence doesn’t fall through the cracks.
Since incident recording software serves as a tool for documenting details of events and incidents, there’s little or no confusion on who to ask questions whenever an accident occurs. The health and safety managers are able to tell what steps were taken to address the issue and even know how workplace incidents are handled when they occur.
With this information, the managers are able to make their teams accountable since they already have concrete evidence on how events unfolded during the accident. Beyond this, the insights that incident recording software provide are extremely useful when it comes to developing corporate safety programs.
6. Updates Senior Managers
Incident recording software often comes with functions that enable companies to regularly update senior managers of health and safety occurrences at the workplace. For instance, some software is designed to send an automated notification to specific managers whenever an incident report is recorded.
Others come with automation for escalating approvals. This enables companies to move actions through different points across the chain of command. The system also generates histories of incident approvals and rejections, which allows for more retrospective analysis.
By updating decision-makers within the organization, companies can pick repeating incidents with ease and identify strategies for minimizing or even eliminating future incidents.
7. Boost Internal Communication
In most instances, poor communication between employees and the management is the leading cause of workplace accidents. This challenge is addressed effectively by getting workplace incident reporting software. By ensuring that clients, employees, and contractors are aware of the safety procedures that a company has put in place, the risk of workplace incidents is significantly reduced.
As mentioned earlier, workplace incident recording software enables companies to leverage cloud-based technology to give employees access to the incident reporting system from any mobile device or computer as long as they have an internet connection. This means employees and any other person in the organization can communicate incidents in real-time, without delays.
Furthermore, during emergencies, incident recording software ensures that senior managers have access to communication timelines. With this information, the managers are able to monitor the communication flow to see whether workplace incidents get escalated, whether they’ve been resolved, and how they were resolved, keeping them informed of incident situations at any given time.
Developing A Workplace Incident Management Strategy
While having workplace incident recording software is a great thing, businesses can only succeed in preventing accidents and managing incidents well when they have a well-thought strategy.
To develop a good incident management strategy, consider taking the following steps
1. Create A Plan
First, you need to develop a step-by-step plan to enable your company to deal with the outcomes of a workplace incident. Ideally, such a plan should highlight the procedures that would be followed and the kind of data that should be collected and recorded.
Moreover, the different tasks that should be undertaken and the persons who are responsible for undertaking them should be clarified in the plan.
2. Investigate Workplace Incidents
Any incidents that occur in the workplace should be investigated well. To enable this, an incident management plan should clearly stipulate the team that’s responsible for this task and ensure that it’s appraised beforehand. Such people should be trained well on the task and have a proper understanding of the process to follow in the event an accident occurs. This will ensure that the process of investigating and handling accidents runs smoothly.
Once the investigation team and process have been defined well, companies should ensure that they take control of the process as early as possible when an incident occurs. Often, the first steps that investigators should take are to notify the relevant officials and then secure the scene of the accident.
3. Craft A Course Of Action
After investigations and the cause of the accident has been identified, companies should craft a course of action. Such a plan should highlight the measures or steps that’ll be taken to keep similar accidents from happening in the future.
For instance, companies could review their training manuals and approaches if the cause of an accident is improper use of company equipment.
4. Implement The Action Plan And Draw Learning
To curb workplace accidents and lower the risk of it ever happening again, businesses should focus on fully implementing the action plan that’s developed under step four. Acting on the corrective steps in the plan enables companies to prevent the recurrence of such incidents. While understanding the cause of workplace accidents is critical, gathering valuable insights and using them to shape valuable lessons is equally important.
After drawing lessons from the evidence presented by the data, consider taking steps to identify specific ways to keep repeat accidents from recurring. Doing this ensures that everyone benefits from the evidence gathered when they use the workplace incident recording software.
Final Thoughts
Companies have the responsibility to ensure that their staff, contractors, and clients are safe at all times. The easiest way to achieve this is to get workplace incident recording software. With such a system, businesses can monitor patterns of how accidents occur, fatalities that result from those accidents, and the factors that contribute to workplace accidents.
Furthermore, this information enables companies to identify strategic actions to prevent the recurrence of such accidents and keep tabs on the resolution of incidents in the workplace. Most importantly, businesses that use workplace incident recording software can enjoy improved compliance with workplace safety laws and reduced accident rates.
A Backpacker with keen interest in Digital marketing. Responsible and passionate for building a digital culture at SoftwareSuggest. Grabber to implement new competitive ideas to analyze and boost online presence. Could be found in mountains and solo traveler by birth.
