How to Automate Workplace Safety Reporting with a Mobile Forms App

More than 5,200 workers died on the job in 2018, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

That’s more than 14 per day.

If your employees are exposed to health or safety hazards (if you work in the manufacturing and construction industries, for example), it’s your job to ensure that everyone makes it home at the end of their shift.

That means making sure your workers are following all safety procedures, all of the time. It also means responding to accidents, near-misses, and reported concerns quickly.

But identifying, reporting, and responding to safety hazards in a timely manner can be a challenge.

The challenges of traditional safety inspections

Conducting an equipment inspection or safety audit may seem like a trivial (and time-consuming) task for workers who are under tight deadlines — especially if it means stopping work to collect the correct inspection form or making an extra trip to the office to turn paperwork in.

And management has no visibility into worker performance when inspections are done on paper. There’s no way to know that inspections have been completed in a timely manner — or at all — until you receive that slip of paper at the end of the day. (Even then, can you be sure your equipment or site was evaluated carefully and thoroughly?)

Even when completed properly, paper-based processes create delays with illegible handwriting, data-entry errors, and incomplete, lost, or damaged forms. This can cause serious safety issues and trends to be remediated too slowly or overlooked altogether.

This puts not just your employees at risk, but your company’s financial health as well. On-the-job injuries that negatively impact your experience rating can send your insurance premiums through the roof. And if you’re deemed negligent by OSHA, you could face fines in the hundreds of thousands.

Companies that use paper inspection forms also incur the costs of inefficiency and waste: U.S. companies spend more than $120 billion on printed forms every year — most of which are out of date within three months. According to a Gartner study, approximately 3% of the average company’s revenue is spent on paper, printing, filing, and storage.

That’s why more companies are leveraging mobile technology to automate their safety reporting.

The benefits of automated safety reporting

With a low-code/no-code mobile forms app, you can create customized apps for equipment inspections, compliance checklists, site safety audits, and hazard reporting that employees can download and complete on a smartphone or tablet in a fraction of the time it takes to fill and submit paper inspection forms.

Using the Fulcrum platform, you can build your own custom inspection app with our easy-to-use drag-and-drop mobile form builder in just a few minutes (or download one of our premade templates in seconds) and deploy it to your inspectors, wherever they are.

And when it’s time to make changes to your inspection forms, you can update them in the app designer and share them with your team instantly.

Workers can then perform thorough, accurate inspections (and attach photos and videos) or document safety hazards with just a few clicks on the smartphone they are already carrying — even without internet connectivity. Fulcrum stores the data locally on their device and syncs to the cloud once they’re back online.

Once the report is synced, managers have immediate access to the data so they can respond quickly to job-site hazards to keep their teams out of harm’s way.

With a user-friendly interface, offline functionality, and access to unlimited apps, Fulcrum makes safety protocols easy to follow and issues easy to resolve.

Ready to automate your workplace safety processes? Try Fulcrum free for 14 days!