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Workplace Safety Reporting – How to Streamline

In pursuing health and success for a business, safety compliance is critical and we understand why. Monitoring injuries and potential hazards can help your workplace combat risks and costly fines. It can also make employees feel safer, but understanding where to begin isn’t always easy.

Maintaining workplace health and safety reporting is a practical challenge for HR teams already balancing a lot on their plates. Plus, fluidity and growth in the compliance industry over the past few years have added some complex obstacles.

Reporting requirements are likely to keep shifting. The more aware you are of changing regulations, the better prepared you will be to meet the uncertainty of maintaining health and safety in the workplace.

Meeting Regulations Around Employee Health and Safety

There are no two ways about it: Being compliant in the workplace is a must for companies that don’t want to welcome risk. For starters, companies that don’t adequately or accurately report workplace incidents could incur financial penalties from regulatory bodies or have legal action taken against them. What’s more, the public could form the opinion that your company doesn’t protect its most valued assets: employees.

Being prepared to confront the evolving nature of health and safety concerns can put you at ease when an unfortunate incident does occur. But how should you go about it practically? These three elements should be part of your action plan to maintain health and safety in the workplace:

1. Make record-keeping a habit.

Employee health and safety is something no company can afford not to prioritize. If a workplace incident or mishap occurs, you shouldn’t wait to report or record it.

Getting proactive about record-keeping will save you a lot of time and stress when reporting to the Occupational Safety and Health Association, or OSHA. Track recordable incidents throughout the year and always maintain an accurate count of all information required for the OSHA log. This information can include injury information (e.g., date, body part, location), restricted days, lost time, the annual average number of employees, and their total hours worked.


This data can be complicated and time-consuming to gather in one fell swoop, so establish a practice of thoroughly documenting every injury, incident, and safety audit as it occurs. Doing so will also put troves of insightful safety data in your hands. For example, suppose the numbers tell you that the most common injury in your organization is lower back pain. In that case, you could introduce preventive measures, such as mandatory lunchtime stretching periods or weight limits on packages. The more informed you stay on injury occurrences, the more proactive and supportive you can be about employee safety.

2. Work to reduce employee injuries.

The safest way to make OSHA reporting more efficient is to have fewer employee injuries. Easier said than done, sure, but if you and your team dedicate time to preventing injuries, you might be surprised at the difference. 

Start by removing any unnecessary hazards from your workplace. Then, try scheduling regular check-ins with your employees and taking note of their safety concerns. These conversations can help you shine a spotlight on hazards you haven’t even considered.

That said, actively trying to avoid on-site injuries doesn’t guarantee they won’t happen. A business that works with any risk will have a run-in with OSHA at some point. If you’re unlucky enough to have to report a fatality, serious incident, or complaint against your business, OSHA will reach out to you for additional information.

When it does, you want to be ready to comply with the OSHA reporting requirements. Be prepared to present a record of all nonminor injuries, copies of the safety training provided to employees, and hazard assessments. These documentations also serve to educate your team continuously about safety trends.

3. Categorize staff logs.

When your company diligently maintains accurate safety reports, it creates a buffer against legal action. Reports are verifiable and evidential, and they can help make your case if your business faces a lawsuit.

Keeping timely safety reports is especially useful because many lawsuits happen months or even years after an incident. Preserving documents like associate reports, investigation summaries, medical documents, email correspondence, and photographic or video evidence means you can be ready to inform your legal team when ready.

Your HR network might be complicated, especially right now when contingent workforces are trending. When working with different types of employees (e.g., seasonal, part-time, or temporary employees), make it a little easier on yourself by distinguishing among them. If you’re working with a staffing agency, ensure that they have strong safety processes, prioritize associate safety, manage incident documentation, and oversee workers’ compensation claims.

Making compliance reporting more efficient in your workplace will take some time. Once you have a plan in place, reporting activities should be easier and more efficient. 

Maintaining health and safety in the workplace is critical for your business’s survival. Streamlined reporting will help you stay organized and safeguarded from legal action. Prioritizing health and safety is also a necessary investment in the value employees bring to your company. It can lead to fewer accidents and injuries. It can help keep your teams healthy and ready to perform at their best.

 

But First, A Single Source Of Business Truth

“He picks up scraps of information
He’s adept at adaptation
Because for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay…”

—Neil Peart (musician and writer), “Digital Man”

So I’m standing there and this HR VP walks up and asks:

“What does the ‘predict’ mean?”

At first I don’t get it and am not sure what to say; repetitive tech talking with waves of people stretched over time can dull one’s focal strength, like trying to blow bubbles with stiff old gum that lost its flavor hours earlier.Predict

Then he points to the one of the panels in our PeopleFluent booth with the word “predict” on it.

“Ah, good question,” I say, perking up. “That’s probably something you’re hearing a lot more from your management team. How do we predict? Am I right?”

He nods and adds, “Analytics, analytics, analytics! Seriously. We need predictive analytics that can help us understand who is engaged, who is performing, and why, but we’re not sure exactly how to get there.”

Certainly one of the major themes at this year’s 2014 HR Technology Conference & Exposition, thousands of HR technology buyers and influencers hiked for miles and miles through a $15 billion landscape according to Bersin by Deloitte’s HR Technology for 2015: Ten Big Disruptions Ahead.

Bersin’s latest report states that finance, marketing, and supply-chain organizations have implemented analytics solutions for decades, but only now is HR starting to see the benefits with only 4% of large organizations able to “predict” or “model” their workforce. However, more than 90% can model and predict budgets, financial results, and expenses.

Talent analytics, analytics, analytics!

That’s why business leaders continue to shout more frequently from their rooftops about getting the right talent analytics from HR today that inform their near- and long-term recruiting, performance, compensation, succession and learning strategies — all to support their corporate financial goals and ultimate results.

And as I’ve written about before, to get there, we need a single source of business truth!

Wait, what’s that you ask? It makes common business sense, but just isn’t the reality HR executives are living in today. The majority of business leaders agree that the most vital investments for long-term growth are the people they attract, hire and employ, but too many are still focused primarily on basic (reactive) reporting.

This week in fabulous Las Vegas, we echoed TalentCulture #TChat Show guest Jessica Miller-Merrell that we just can’t get to the truth from reactive reporting and gut checks, so where do we start?

TChat Trending

Data management is where it all starts, although aggregating and maintaining the sheer volume of talent data available today can be daunting to even the most progressive CHROs. Large organizations have multiple systems managing HR and financial data, and to get to a single source of business truth, you must maintain and leverage both micro (such as individual performance data) and macro (such as organizational trends) data together, unifying it from any and all systems so that it is transformed, standardized and reportable.

Only then you’ll be able to plot past trajectories, analyze the present, and predict the future needs of your talent supply chain management, which can in turn lead to measurable improvement in your financial performance.

Mature talent analytics and positive business outcomes come to those who master their data, and, again according to Bersin, the 14% of companies that have invested in data-focused HR far outperform those that haven’t. Recruitment efforts are two times more effective and stock returns outperformed their peers by 30% over the last three years. But of course, these results don’t come without a serious investment of energy, resources and time.

The benefits of creating a single source of business truth are huge. Companies outperforming all others today focus on delivering:

  1. Recruiting Analytics – Help you understand your current talent supply, both internally and externally, and the skills needed today versus those that will be needed tomorrow. Plus, leveraging the diversity strengths of organizations beyond gender, race and geography to include the skills and expertise that lead to business growth are important predictive elements in planning for the right skills and productivity tomorrow. For example, Center for Talent Innovation research showed that diversity “unlocks innovation and drives market growth” and companies that embrace diversity “are 45% likelier to report that their firm’s market share grew over the previous year and 70% likelier to report that the firm captured a new market.”
  2. Compensation and Performance Analytics – Give you the ability to define your investment strategy in people because it’s less about budget management and mediocre (or worse) pay practices, and more about driving business growth relative to individual and organizational performance. This is critical to preventing future compensation increases for poor performers by using predictive analytics to highlight where these have happened historically and why. For example, according to a 2014 compensation and benefits survey by Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the research arm of Talent Management magazine, only 40% of companies say their organization’s compensation program is fully aligned with the business strategy.
  3. Learning & Development Analytics – Provide you a clearer view into strategizing continuous development and improving retention. Predictive analytics allow you to look at current sales relative to high-performer output and retention, and see how they impact long-term sales and development. Firms require an engaged and developed workforce so they can promote from within, saving on external recruiting costs that don’t ensure even short-term retention in today’s competitive talent market. In fact, according to Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell, “external hires” get significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years on the job than do internal workers who are promoted into similar jobs.

It’s time to answer the talent analytics call!

HR can and should drive their organization’s workforce strategy from a unified platform of meaningful data and analytics. But first, a single source of business truth is critical to providing guidance for all your talent management decisions, reinforcing the relationships among finance, operations and all business units in your organization, and delivers the ultimately desired business performance and results.

Constant change is here to stay, so you may as well get comfortable with picking up the scraps of perpetual information that ultimately create the right talent analytics collective.

Anybody got any gum?

 

photo credit: ♔ Georgie R via photopin cc