How to elevate your corrective action management strategy

Corrective action management is the process of coordinating implementation of solutions to issues like safety incidents, production slowdowns, quality errors, and more. And like most areas of operational performance, there are always improvements you can make to your strategy. Check out the top improvements below!

Plan your preventive follow-up

The biggest mistake you can make with corrective action management is to leave it there. Because if you really want to make your workplace safer, you need to ask yourself:

“How am I going to solve the problem once and for all?”

A good corrective action management strategy ensures the completion and documentation of all action items. An excellent strategy goes even further to plan preventive solutions that can stop the incident from happening again. If you want to elevate your approach, figure out how to guarantee that every incident has both corrective and preventive actions in the follow-up.

Involve employees in the process

Getting your employees involved in corrective action management is a great way to foster a culture of safety. It allows you to teach your workers about the aftermath of workplace accidents. Here are some ways you can involve them in the process:

• Ask for corrective action ideas following incidents
• Get help implementing a new process, piece of equipment, etc.
• Test out an idea within a single department or area first
• Do a focus group to explore different courses of action

Keep detailed records

Corrective actions are meant to solve problems, and there’s a lot you can learn from them even if they don’t work. But you can’t learn from the past if you can’t remember it. That’s where recordkeeping comes in.

One of the biggest lessons I learned early in my career was to keep notes of everything I’m working on. This has helped me figure out where I went wrong with an idea or how I could apply past successes to new problems.

Keeping detailed notes of:

• What your team’s working on
• Who’s in charge of what
• How long it takes to implement actions
• How effective or ineffective corrective actions are

With this information, you can avoid repeating past failures. Plus, you can get a better idea of how much time you need to take corrective action. Learning from the past is a great way to set realistic expectations and improve your approach.

Upgrade to EHS software

EHS software is the number one tool you can use to level up your corrective action management program. It replaces many of the manual tasks that come with documenting incidents or projects and tracking follow-up.

Here are just some of the things you can do with Frontline ACT:

• Quickly compile status reports for all action items
• Schedule and assign corrective actions to different members of your team
• Send out automated notifications of upcoming or past due actions
• Attach supplementary documents like photos and videos
• Keep detailed notes about your progress on actions
• Organize and categorize EHS data

One of the best advantages of tracking everything with cloud-based software is that you can view important documents from almost anywhere. This is a major advantage in industries like mining or oil and gas where job sites are remote.