Organizational Structure & Critical Incidents

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires employers to provide employees with a safe, hazard-free work environment. As such, safety management plans are developed and instituted by organizations to inform the workplace of ways to stay safe at work. Reporting critical incidents is an essential part of safety management.

Function

Organizational structures, as they pertain to critical incidents, exhibit the chain of command for reporting health and safety hazards. Having an established organizational flow for critical incident reporting allows companies to respond quickly to hazards so that they can prevent further incidents from occurring.

Flow

When employees report a critical incident, the report is passed up the chain of command. Typically, companies designate their safety managers or safety representatives to be the first in the chain of command to receive incident reports. After they have reviewed and logged the incident, the information is passed up to the next authority, which is usually the human-resources department or risk manager.

Considerations

Even the chiefs and executives at the top of the organizational structure are interested in how many critical incidents the workforce experiences, as this information tells them how to make improvements. They may also be interested in the information from a liability standpoint, to determine who, if anyone, is at fault for the incident.

References

• OSHA: Worker Rights