Reasons Why OSHA Recordkeeping is Critical for Your Business

The Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) focuses on ensuring the safety of employees by monitoring all work-related injuries and illnesses. To facilitate this, every employer in the United States is required to keep records of any incidence that results in harm to the employee.

OSHA provides clear and concise requirements and criteria for recording and reporting occupational injuries and illnesses so that there can be no misunderstandings or confusion. To further encourage transparency, OSHA’s website publicly displays and corporation’s workplace violation history. These recordkeeping methods ensure accountability on behalf of employers and are integral to safety planning.

According to OSHA, the importance of recordkeeping is crucial to maintaining high safety and health standards for several reasons:

1. No business is free of risk. There is always the possibility that an employee will be injured on the job.
2. Maintaining records of all work-related injuries and illnesses can illuminate ongoing issues within the safety structure of a corporation or industry. Locating these weak points can prevent more extensive injuries in the future.
3. Accurate records allow for more informed decision making. This in turn leads to better safety plans and more effective implementation of those plans.
4. Employees that are fully informed of the risks and hazards found in their workplace will be more likely to follow cautious work practices and report workplace hazards that may be overlooked by management.

OSHA employs compliance officers who are tasked with studying injury and illness data to identify hazardous practices and to develop plans to alleviate these risks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also uses injury and illness records as the source data for the ‘Annual Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses’. This annual survey compiles nationwide and industry wide safety and health trends.

Recent advances in technology have allowed employer reporting and recordkeeping to be seamless. There are a wide variety of businesses that offer their services to uphold reporting and recordkeeping practices that comply with OSHA standards. Online Applications such as SafetyAssure, enable employees to log incidents, accidents, near misses, and report observations with quickly and easily. There are several other apps available today in 2021 that do the same thing. These effortless mobile and web apps promote safety in the workplace and help avoid violations without any administrative burden. Upholding high safety standards protects businesses from incurring hefty fines from workplace violations and doing so has never been easier!