At the end of the day, the smartest and easiest way to reduce incidents in the workplace is to make people more conscious and aware of what they are doing.

Conducting pre-start discussions allows everyone to talk about what might go right or wrong, what other people have encountered when working on this before (together people have seen and identified more hazards) and to bring awareness to the job being done today.

Sometimes people need a little nudge to do what you want them to do - and ultimately what is good for them and you.

Often making an effort to encourage people to recognise hazards helps, especially in an open forum. Sometimes people feel as though they are being dramatic or that they are wasting people's time by identifying and reporting hazards.

A great way to ensure this attitude doesn't propagate throughout your organisation is to openly encourage your organisation to be as proactive as possible, and that identifying a hazard is never a waste of time.

If encouragement doesn't work, then you can also test incentivising and gamifying some of your safety processes. For example, give a prize, award or recognition to the person who identifies the most hazards.

Doing regular safety inspections and audits helps you take notice of the environment. When you walk around and actively look for problems and hazards, they often arise.

There's no need to do full audits once a week, but having a regular cadence for your safety inspections and audits ensures you are picking up all of the obvious hazards in your workplace.

Not all incidents can be easily seen or heard . In fact, some hazards need more specific and detailed monitoring.

Noise monitoring, vibration monitoring and other environmental and safety monitoring activities bring to light not easily visible hazards which are often overlooked and ignored.

Setting up regular testing periods ensures you are always tracking the more easily ignored hazards which can be slower, but just as damaging.

If you are lucky enough to get to the point where you are getting a regular flow of hazard incident reports and forms, then it is important to action them in order to prevent future occurrence.

The act of identifying a hazard isn't enough; someone needs to take action (when required).

It is good practice to sit down and go through past hazards and hazard identification forms to make sure you didn't miss anything and look for patterns in the reporting.