Zero incidents—it’s the ultimate goal for any organization, but making it a reality is a complex process that takes work, commitment and long-term planning. It also requires effort not only on the part of the safety manager, but from your company as a whole. From new policies to training to cultural changes, it involves a lot more than the elimination of risks. Here are six strategies that will help you meet your zero-incident goal sooner rather than later.

Employee involvement is critical to improving the safety of your company. Simply instructing workers on new policies and procedures generates little to no buy-in, and it may even make them feel as if safety is out of their hands. People learn best by becoming engaged in the learning process, and gathering employees’ input helps them understand how new rules and regulations will apply to their jobs.

How can you better engage your employees? 

One of the best methods is the toolbox talk, a group discussion where workers and safety managers focus on specific issues together. Toolbox talks are informal and brief, and they can be used weekly and even daily to improve your company’s safety culture. They can also give workers a sense of responsibility for their own safety, which will lead to fewer accidents, illnesses and related costs in the long run.

Chances are, you’re already conducting at least a few toolbox talks already, but there’s always room for improvement. From better employee feedback to measurably improved outcomes, you’ll certainly be able to tell when your talks become more effective. Here are a few tips for making the most of them.

It’s easy enough to tell one person to do one task and follow up with that employee later. But what do you do when you have hundreds or even thousands of safety-related tasks to distribute among hundreds of workers? How do you keep track of who’s done what – and when – and follow up to make sure every job gets completed before its deadline? 

Different sets and subsets of tasks may have different timelines, urgencies and degrees of skill involved, and you’ve got to track all of these variables to keep operations running smoothly and safely at your company.

Done by hand, task management can seem impossible, particularly when you’re implementing new safety policies or carrying out company-wide training exercises. With the BasicSafe Action Management tool, however, keeping track of complicated sets of tasks and assignees is quick and easy. 

Here are four ways the tool empowers safety managers and saves time.

With constantly changing federal, state and local regulations, keeping up with environmental compliance can become a serious headache – especially when you've got training, claims and other safety-related tasks to take care of. Fortunately for safety managers and other admins, we've just released a new Planner / Scheduler tool as part of our BasicSafe safety management software suite.  

When a customer comes to us with a unique problem, we strive to respond with a customized solution. It’s one of the benefits of being a self-sufficient safety software company, and it’s what we do best. 

Our customers have requested several custom safety tools over the past year, and now we’re excited to make three of them available to everyone.

If you’ve been using BasicSafe's integrated safety software, you probably already know our audit management software allows you to upload existing audits, create new ones and set up reminders for the next round.