Why You’re Not Loving Your Safety Program


Is your safety program designed for maximum impact, or do you feel somewhat disappointed with your current safety program?

Here are some of the reasons you may not be satisfied with where your safety program is at today:

1. Your incentive program isn’t working

If your incentive system is based on injuries alone, you may have a problem. That’s because when incentives are solely focused on the number of injuries, you might be unintentionally discouraging people from reporting those near-misses, injuries, or illnesses.

Where you want to be instead: Ideally, you are continually identifying and then rewarding the right behaviors—for individuals and for teams. Behavior-based incentives are much more effective at reinforcing a proactive, positive safety culture.

2. Your program is mostly reactive

When the focus is on lagging indicators, everything related to safety can feel…so, well, reactive.

The problem with this approach is obvious: when you’re not able to be proactive, you’re not able to know why issues are happening, and you certainly are not equipped to prevent incidents or accidents, either.

3. Lack of organization and consistency

Ever feel like an incident gets “lost” in your current system? Or maybe you feel like your safety paperwork is never quite as organized as it could be…

One of the best ways to improve risk management is to be as consistent and organized as possible with your safety program. Even with great employees, breakdowns can occur if there is no clear, consistent, and organized approach to safety and compliance.

The fix: do what you can to create a predictable process for people to follow when it comes to all your safety-related activities. This is also one of the most effective ways you can see a dramatic reduction in your number and cost of incidents…and your claims, as a result.

This consistency and structure will vastly improve your root cause analysis and your ability to see the “why” behind what’s happening in your company.

Don’t know where to start? Consider these three areas:

  •      Use iReport for a guided, consistent way to report injuries, near-misses, or to do track safety activities like safety audits, site inspections, and more.
  •      Go digital with iReport. As an all-in-one safety platform, you don’t have to use SDS binders and you’ll never have to worry about manually tracking employee training or employee progress again.
  •      Put up-to-date information all one place. iReport gives you the tools to maintain, track, and store all your safety related documents. This way, they are always accessible to anyone who needs them—no matter where they are located

iReportSource is a complete Safety Management Software that can help you save time, reduce risk, and improve employee safety.

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4. The amount of time you spend in spreadsheets

Many safety leaders report that they spend as much as 4 hours per week preparing reports or working in spreadsheets.

Many other safety leaders have so much on their day-to-day plate, they admit they are weeks—or even months—behind when it comes to collecting, compiling, and making their safety data useful.

The reality is that it doesn’t have to be a burden to use data to improve your culture. iReport makes it simple to identify and track customized, leading indicators that help you master your culture. The best part is it’s all in real-time. No more spending hours preparing reports or sorting through data!

5. Lack of mobility

If you get THAT call in the middle of the night, are you forced to drive back to a worksite to manage what happens next? Or what happens if you have an incident or near-miss occur on a remote worksite?

The solution: If an incident or near-miss happens, you need a platform that allows you to take your company’s safety culture with you, wherever the job may be. Accidents can happen anywhere, so you need to be prepared everywhere.

With iReport’s mobile app, for example, you can know exactly what’s happening in your business, no matter where your employees are. Whether they’re working in the warehouse or on a remote job site, they can report incidents and review important safety documents from anywhere.

Just as important, iReport allows for ALL safety documents, such as safety instructions, to be accessible on-the-go. That’s important when it comes to truly empowering your people.

Last, iReport’s mobile app provides a guided, standardized process for users when it comes to reporting the critical information they need to collect for every type of incident. That results in better data collection and better insights down the line, but let’s face it: if an incident happens, you wouldn’t want to forget to collect key details that could save your business millions of dollars, either!

6. Difficulty in showing ROI

If you were asked to show the ROI on your safety program, would you be able to do so…and do you have the tools to help you do that easily?

A major area of concern for safety and HR managers today is they feel like they don’t have the metrics and data to show the true impact their programs are having on safety and productivity for the business. If you’re unsure about how you’d show the real-time ROI of your safety program, you’re not alone.

You need the ability to move to a system that shows what’s been done, what’s being done today, and where you’re headed next.

It varies for every organization, but some of those metrics might include:

  •      Total savings;
  •      Costs avoided, which may also include downtime per day, distractions avoided, and/or insurance premium increases you’ve missed, for example;
  •      Accountability documents;
  •      Number of safety trainings completed and other key safety behaviors;
  •      JSAs completed;
  •      Corrective actions;
  •      Types of near misses and other factors related to near misses;
  •      Improvements related to TCIR, DART, LTIR, and more;
  •      OSHA Recordable types.

You are well aware there are any direct and indirect costs that happen with any incident or injury. With that said, effective data will allow you to show at least some of these indirect costs. That’s a powerful tool when it comes to showing ROI and in giving a strong rationale for future safety investments.

7. A “safety police” mentality

Are safety leaders seen as overly focused on what’s wrong in your business? Or is there the perception that safety leaders overly focused on compliance, processes, or the “rule book”?

Ideally, you want a team-oriented culture that looks beyond procedures or compliance.

Instead of “Did we do it?” the question coming from across the organization should be: “How did we do it?” and, “What did we learn from it?”

Use iReportSource to Create a Proactive Safety Program

With iReportSource, knowledge really is power. Every user you choose in the organization can have visibility into how each incident is progressing towards closure. Not only can you drill down, track, and monitor specific activities in iReport, you have a real-time view of all your “big picture” metrics that matter, too.

Want to learn more? Get in touch to learn more about how you can own your safety culture and prevent injuries before they happen with iReport.

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