Digitizing incident reports is a great way to standardize reporting, speed up the response time, and ensure that incidents are documented diligently and in a timely manner.
When it comes to reporting, you should bear the full cycle in mind from when an incident occurs and is reported, all the way to the end-of-month analysis. Connecteam supports you through all stages of the process and this article will provide you with a holistic view of how we recommend approaching reporting in your organization.
While this article will use an incident report as an example, the same principles can be applied to any other report.
In this article we will go over the following:
STEP 1: Start with structuring the report
When drafting your incident report, we recommend segmenting it into 3 sections:
Information Gathering
Consequences and Impact Classification
Conclusions Summary
Information Gathering
When drafting your incident report, take advantage of the variety of possible inputs, to capture the most essential information:
Date and time - to capture the exact time when the incident took place.
Location - get accurate information on the location where the incident happened. If it’s on the road, capture it using a GPS geo-stamp, and if it's on your facility - let your employee mark the exact location from a pre-defined locations list.
Images - get live and accurate updates of the incident by providing your team members with a way to upload images of the incident in real time.
Detailed description - include a detailed description of the event for your team, where they can describe in detail what happened.
Parties and Witnesses' contact information for follow-up purposes.
Optional: Using Connecteam you could also allow users to include a recording to instantly capture a voice recording, describing the incident.
Consequences and Impact Classification
Severity ranking - leverage the ranking object to get a preliminary severity estimation from your team.
Impact classification - Use defined categories to make it simple to classify the incident. We recommend including near-miss, equipment damage, minor injury, and major injury.
Impact description - Allow for an open text description to provide more background on the consequences of the incident
Conclusions Summary
Lessons learned - Give the reporting party the option to share their insights on key factors that led to the incidents and the lessons learned from it.
Recommendations for future prevention - Query about potential preventative measures that can be implemented to prevent such incidents from happening again
Below is an example of a suggested incident report:
Pro Tip: Use our incident reports from the form templates, when creating a new form, choose "use templates" and search "Incident Report", you can use the template or you can adjust the template to your needs.
STEP 2: Automatically distribute the reports to relevant stakeholders
Whether it be your safety officer, facility manager, or someone else in your organization, the ability to distribute information quickly to relevant stakeholders is crucial. In Connecteam, information-sharing is more simple than ever. After the report has been submitted you can allow your users the following distribution options:
Automatically share the form submission with someone within your organization
Have them choose to share the form from a list of contacts
You can learn all about form-sharing options in this article.
Below is an example of the PDF copy that is automatically generated and distributed to the relevant stakeholders:
STEP 3: Follow-up actions
Follow-up actions are where you as a manager will be able to quickly follow up on any incident or report within your organization. By utilizing the variety of follow-up actions that Connecteam offers, you can categorize your reports by status, you are able to add manager notes, send follow-up notes to users, share copies with additional managers, get managers to sign and approve the report, and more.
In our incident report for reference, we included the following follow-up actions:
Keep track of status progress with a status field, easily classifying each incident as 'Pending review', 'In progress', 'dismissed', or 'Resolved' as it unfolds.
Send feedback to the reporting party using a not field that is viewable by the user, so employees will be notified once you leave a feedback comment.
Share a pdf copy with additional stakeholders, using a 'person' column to automatically inform them about the incident that took place.
All entries are automatically logged:
Follow-up actions section:
Cumulative analysis and findings (once a month/quarter).
Depending on your organization, you probably conduct a monthly or quarterly analysis and review of all reports submitted by your team. Forget about the days when you had to search through a file cabinet for specific entries. With Connecteam, locating, and exporting your Forms entries is easier than ever. Thanks to advanced filtering, you can search for your entries by severity, witness name, date, time, and even status. Everything is at your disposal, giving you the ability to take immediate action in real-time.
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