Incident Reporting

All businesses operate with the intent of ensuring their customers and employees are happy and safe. The unfortunate reality, however, is that incidents in business happen every day around the world. As a responsible leader in the industry it is imperative that we prepare our teams to respond to any incidents that may happen.

A industry study by the Mission Support Alliance shared that greatest benefits of proper incident reporting to an organization include:

• Creating a formal recording of what happened 
• Helping facilitate proper investigations when needed 
• Supports legal requirements for organizations like OSHA or other governing bodies
• Enable trend analysis post incident so organizations can know where to focus time and energy to prevent future incidents. 

Proper incident reporting begins and ends with your front line employees and can only  be enabled through proper training from day one. Incidents can be chaotic and emotional moments and having employees fully prepared to respond will ensure an accurate recording of the incident.. There are a few key elements to ensure every member of the team is prepared to respond with: 

• Immediacy - Once all parties involved in the incident have been properly taken care of it is critical that the documentation process starts as soon as possible. As time passes, details about the incident can begin to get fuzzy for those involved. Your team’s ability to respond quickly after an incident will enable them to get the best, most accurate information from everyone involved as possible. 

• Factual - Employees should avoid any judgments or drawing any conclusions in the time of reporting. Training your teams that the proper, fact based documentation is the first step in root cause investigation will help your organization in any follow up afterwards. 
• Accurate and thorough - In incident reporting, details matter. It is important that your teams get as much information from as many people that were involved in the process as possible. This can include:
• Detailed descriptions of the incident itself (what, when, where, why)
• Names, information and statements of those involved to follow up
• Photographs or video where possible
• Final sign off 

A few tips on how Zenput can help:

Create incident report forms for your locations that comply with the requirements within your industry (e.g. OSHA). Since Zenput’s forms are updated in the system in real time, you can feel safe that your teams will have the most up to date form possible. 

• Utilize the photo and video capabilities within Zenput’s forms to ensure your teams are documenting everything possible at the time of the incident
• Ensure that anyone in the organization who needs to know about incidents is added to the “Send Submissions To” to ensure they receive a copy. This is found on the “Triggers'' section of the form builder. 
• Share the form with all stores by navigating to the “Distribute” tab on the form builder and adding all desired users. 
• Next, send an Announcement to your teams to ensure they know about the form and where to find it. 
• Follow that up with a form giving more detailed instructions. Include reference photos if needed and ask them to provide photos of the steps they need to know about. 
• Utilize Zenput’s submission reporting to track common issues across your organization over time. Are there certain dayparts that see more incidents than others? Do you see more incidents in your parking lots than in store? Knowing this can enable your organization to proactively focus on those areas and reduce incidents. 
• Create mock incidents for locations to document on a regular cadence to review how well teams understand the incident reporting process. Reviewing these can help you pinpoint which teams may need more training or reinforcement. 

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If you would like to have this form template added to your Zenput account, please copy and paste the message below into the Chat function in Zenput and our Support team will add it for you:  “Hi Support, can you please add the form below to our account? Incident Report : Safety Pillar - 402336”