Reducing the amount of incidents in the workplace should be a high priority for any business. However, sadly many companies wait until it’s too late to start putting procedures in place to reduce the risk for their employees.

As soon as you sense something isn’t right with a workplace safety policy, a workplace set up or an injury on site and how it’s being managed, it’s crucial that you report it. Without businesses taking a critical eye to their safety management procedures, they will never be able to progress and reduce the amount of incidents in the workplace.

If you stumbled upon this article because you know your businesses safety isn’t up to scratch and you need to do something about it, take a look at the ways that a business can reduce the amount of incidents in the workplace.

• Audit Your Safety Procedures 

Ideally, this is the entry point for a business to go ‘ah-ha, we can do better’. If you’re coming in at this point and have found this article after some reflection on where your business is failing, good on you! Often people leave it until after an incident has occurred to start making changes to safety measures, and obviously that is less than ideal.

Auditing your safety protocols before an incident occurs is essential, and that’s where a handy tool like Audit Software comes in. Auditing your risks, procedures and data is a crucial part of moving forward successfully and reducing the amount of incidents in future. 

By looking at where previous incidents have occurred, the risks that are still present and the ways you mitigate them, you put yourself in a much stronger position to understand the health and safety status of your organisation. The first step to reducing incidents is to know where the risks are, and to understand whether you’re doing enough to protect people against them.

• Engage The Whole Team In Incident Reduction Measures

Once you’ve looked at what is going on on your site and how things could be better, it’s time to get the whole team on board. Often, companies will undergo these amazing audits and have great policy changes, however they forget to include the workers who are on the ground.

This means that their audit and new regulations miss the vital feedback from workers who will be able to highlight extra risks that leadership teams won’t come up with. By including team members from each department in the audit and reconstruction of safety procedures, you’ll ensure that everyone is in it together from the off.

Keeping workers engaged in safety is a crucial part of minimising risks. Often leadership teams will ‘take over’ the safety changes without consulting the people who actually need to implement them and this is a mistake. Engage the whole team for full coverage of your organisation.

• Implement Training To Reduce Incidents

When we think of workplace training, we often think about the kind of learning that goes on at the start of a contract. This is often really effective and is crucial to ensuring that people are qualified to get on the tools. However, this isn’t the only training that needs to go on.

In order to do your bit when it comes to safety and compliance, your business needs to carry out refresher training to keep people up to date. Often, accidents and incidents will happen when people get complacent and forget the safety training that they did months or even years ago.

To ensure that the risks of the job remain in the forefront of employee’s minds, putting workers through LMS training that they can complete anywhere is a great idea. LMS systems like Beakon’s will alert leadership and employees when their refresher training is due, making sure that your people feel empowered to take their learning into their own hands.

• Review And Improve As Information About Incidents Comes Through

An incident response strategy has to be flexible and agile in order to take into account the kinds of incidents that are happening in your workplace. Each site will be different, and companies need to look at industry and company specific data to see where their incidents are occurring.

By reviewing incident data and taking staff surveys, you will get a good picture of how your organisation is managing safety in real-time. There is no one size fits all to incident management, but by reporting, investigating, analysing and proactively actioning issues, your business will be able to improve processes in order to lessen the likelihood of accidents in the workplace.