Workplace incidents and breaches in policies can disrupt business processes, services, or functions. They can also lead to monetary and reputational loss for an organisation.
If an organisation does not report and negate workplace incidents as far as is reasonably practicable there can be greater consequences.
Let’s understand what workplace incidents are, their reporting and follow up, and how a HRMS can help.
What Are Workplace Incidents?
Workplace incidents are issues that risk the health, safety and security of an organisation’s employees working at a company premise, site, or remotely. As mentioned above, ignoring workplace incidents can result in huge losses. Organisations must invest in resolving such incidents from the moment they first occur. The types of incidents vary based on industries and businesses.
What Is Incident Reporting?
Incident reporting is the process of recording all details about an incident, which can be related to workplace safety, security, property damage, etc., and acknowledging the nominated contacts for their follow-up and resolution. It can be done for any type of workplace or remote working incidents.
The follow-up of incident reports includes incident investigation, hazard report, review, and corrective action. This process helps in identifying the risks, failures, and hazards that resulted in an incident and improving them to prevent them occurring in the future.
The Role of a HRMS In Incident Reporting
Incident reporting was originally done using paper-based traditional systems until very recently. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors and privacy breaches. But the introduction of automation for incident reporting in businesses has streamlined this process.
Online incident reporting software has also become an essential component of a human resource management system. It leads to better management of every type of incident across an organisation to ensure they are followed up with investigations, identity of the causes and more importantly corrective actions.
Listed below are some of the features of a HRMS system for incident reporting.
Efficient management throughout the incident lifecycle
A HRMS allows you to manage the entire incident and breach lifecycle from when it occurred till resolution. This incident lifecycle involves stages such as investigation, analysis, correction, etc. An incident reporting system allows all authorised users to access all the required information and the status of an incident report from a centralised database.
Automated communication workflow
Continuous communication is a requirement when managing a workplace incident. An incident reporting system also helps users send out automated alerts to selected team members based on the severity of the incident. Management is empowered to respond quickly and arrange precautionary measures to prevent further issues. It frees HR or concerned employees from having to continually remind other employees about the progress of the incident.
Realtime and platform-independent
A well-crafted HRMS should be able to be accessed using a variety of hardware and operating system platforms. Hence, it allows users to gather all incident information and feed it into the system as and when they occur. The incident reporting module of an HRMS can be used through a workstation or tablet device. This makes the reporting more accurate as no incident information is lost in transition.
Benefits of Incident Reporting Software
Mitigate risks
Future risks of monetary and reputation loss can be avoided if each incident is recorded and analysed carefully. Without appropriate reporting, corrective actions, and strategic changes incidents tend to repeat resulting in incurring similar losses time and again.
Limit disruptions
When all incidents are studied carefully and acted upon so they are prevented in the future, a company can limit the disruptions occurring to its processes, services, and functions.
Ensure compliance
Government guidelines also require every organisation to document and analyse all incidents. Incident reporting software can help businesses comply with these regulations and generate audit-ready reports whenever required.
Gain complete transparency
Empowered by a HRMS and incident reporting software, every authorised user can access the required information. The centralised and readily accessible database helps ensure transparency to a process that used to be cumbersome and hence prone to errors or misrepresentation of data.
The Takeaway
An effective incident reporting system will ensure an efficient and effective incident reporting process. Sentrient’s HR management system comes with in-built incident and breach reporting software that allows users to easily manage workplace safety and security incidents, breaches, and whistleblowing incidents.
Contact Sentrient HR today to make your workforce aware of the process of incident reporting and take one more step towards becoming a responsible employer.
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