Encourage your employees to report safety issues in the workplace.
Part of maintaining a safe workplace is understanding the risks that your employees face. However, even if you conduct regular workplace inspections and equipment checks, it can be difficult for employers to identify risks before they become full-blown issues. This is why it’s so important to encourage your employees to report safety issues and near-misses. But how can you accomplish this goal? Here are some of the ways that you can get your staff to participate.
Establish Reporting Guidelines for Staff
First, your business needs to have clear guidelines discussing how and when employees should report workplace incidents. Your guidelines should establish record-keeping standards and make it clear that injury events and near-misses should all be reported. Near-misses need to be reported because they play an important role in preventing future incidents that can lead to serious injury. It’s important that your staff understands that near-misses provide an opportunity to improve the safety of your workplace.
Encouraging Incident Reporting
There are many things that business owners can do to encourage their staff to report incidents. Some of the best strategies include:
- Making the process easy- Reporting incidents should be easy and quick. To speed up the process, employers should use reporting tools to improve accessibility. When reporting is an easy and straight-forward process, your staff will be more inclined to do so.
- Allowing employees to make anonymous reports- Many employees choose not to report incidents because they worry about being blamed and fear reprisals. To assuage your employees’ fears, you should allow your staff to report incidents anonymously. This will increase the likelihood of your employees speaking up about workplace incidents.
- Promising that reports will not be met with punishments- When encouraging your staff to report incidents, you need to make it clear that reports will not be met with punishments, such as getting fired. Your staff needs to feel safe and secure, so they are more likely to file accurate and timely reports.
- Addressing issues quickly- When you do get a report, it’s important that you follow up on the issues as soon as possible. When your staff sees that you are taking reports seriously, they will be more motivated to do to same.
These are some of the things that you can do to encourage your employees to report safety issues in the workplace. By valuing your staff’s input, you can take steps to lower your risk for injuries and other incidents. Want another way to take care of your business and staff? Then make sure you have the right commercial coverage in place. For assistance with your business insurance, contact the experts at PMC Insurance Group today.
