Safety spreadsheets and safety spreadsheet templates may seem like an easy solution to incident management, but in reality, they could be detrimental to your company.
Spreadsheets are great tools for their intended use: accounting, some statistics, budgets… math stuff. They were not designed to be digital yellow pads where employees jot notes about incidents.
You need an incident management system for a variety of reasons.
Safety Spreadsheets Have Inconsistent Data Fields
If your business operates on multiple sites, chances are that the safety spreadsheets vary from site to site. One site might have a field for reporting the incident response while another might just have a checkbox. Inconsistent recording leads to inconsistent reporting. Inconsistent reporting leads to inappropriate budget allocations… You see where this is going.
Safety Spreadsheets Don’t Provide Good Analytics
You might be able to color code incidents (injury, equipment failure, theft, maintenance required, neighbor complaint, etc.) on a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet will not gather the color codes into a statistical report. A good incident management system compiles the data automatically so you can see at a glance where you need to pay the most attention. You need to be able to produce these kinds of reports within a matter of days when OSHA comes calling. You shouldn’t pay someone overtime to crunch numbers at the last minute. That’s a recipe for mistakes meriting their own incident reports. Better to invest in an online incident management system that does the work for you in real time.
Safety Spreadsheets Lead to Scattered Data and Ignored Safety Issues
When the spreadsheets are at multiple sites, incident reporting data isn’t centralized. Scattered data means related incidents may not be connected. In other words, multiple sites may experience similar equipment malfunctions, but because incident reporting is scattered, management doesn’t know to increase the frequency of maintenance or to get different equipment. Equipment is one thing. Employee safety is something else. Centralized incident management pinpoints safety hazards that exist company-wide in ways that safety spreadsheets never could.
Safety Spreadsheets Can’t Connect Related Events
Sometimes the same type of incident happens more than once. Those incidents should be grouped together for a variety of reasons. If they are incidents of theft, it builds a case against a suspect or for security cameras. If the incidents are injury related, it points to areas of training that need improvement.
Incident Management Personnel Need Prompt Communication Safety Spreadsheets Don’t Provide
Often times, the person in charge of addressing or responding to incidents is at a different location than where the incident occurred. Adding the incident to a spreadsheet doesn’t notify the proper people promptly (Google Sheets) or at all (Excel). To alleviate safety and theft issues, timely communication is essential.
Safety Spreadsheets Aren’t Secure
Certain incidents need to be seen by certain eyes only for the sake of the person involved. Recording such incidents on a spreadsheet immediately does away with confidentiality because of the number of people with access to the sheet. That’s a matter of internal security. Externally speaking, both Excel and Google Sheets are susceptible to being shared through email or accessed from an outside party without much effort. That’s a matter of external security. Do you really want incidents becoming public knowledge before you or your PR team have a chance to come up with a strategy for responding to said incident?
Safety Spreadsheets Can’t Invite Third-Party Participation Without Compromising Confidentiality
In other words, you can’t just share the entire spreadsheet with an attorney, police detective, or nearby property neighbor without exposing all of your company’s incidents. The alternative, with the spreadsheet method, is to manually collate the appropriate data to share, costing additional time that could be vital to an investigation.
Safety Spreadsheets Are Difficult To Navigate on Mobile Devices
If you run a multisite corporation, chances are that many of your employees spend much of their time out in the field, away from a desktop computer. That means they are forced to report incidents using their mobile devices. Spreadsheets are not user-friendly on mobile devices. The more complicated it is to fill out an incident report, the less likely an employee will be to do so in a timely fashion. Such lack of timeliness affects real-time data, reporting, and safety issues as mentioned above.
Switch from Safety Spreadsheets to Verity Incident Management System
Verity’s online incident management system is user-friendly and addresses all of these issues in specific ways. Upgrade your incident management process to save time, money, and lives in the long run.