Daily site safety checklist in Turkey: what to record and how to report an incident

07:40 in the morning. At the foot of the scaffold, the foreman sees a worker climbing up without a hard hat, calls out and brings him down; the worker puts on his hard hat and climbs back up. The matter seems closed; nobody writes it down that evening, because the foreman has a lot on that morning and does not want to blame anyone. Three weeks later there is an accident on the same scaffold, and no record backs up the statement “someone has climbed up without a hard hat before”. On construction sites in Turkey, a daily site safety checklist is a list used to walk through the areas that need safety checks in the same order every day and record any non-conformities; its real value is that even warnings that seem routine leave a trace.

The form has two parts: a checklist that covers the same areas every day, and a separate incident record that is opened when something happens. Below we cover both, followed by the relevant articles we read in Turkey’s Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331.

Which areas does a daily site safety checklist cover?

This table is a starting outline. Decide with your OHS specialist which areas will be checked on your site, how often and by whom; this article does not say which form is mandatory.

How do I record a worker on scaffolding without a hard hat?

1. Make it safe first. Warn the worker, bring them down if necessary and have the equipment completed; the record comes after the intervention.
2. Write it down straight away. Report in one sentence what you saw, where (block, floor, scaffold façade), at what time and in which crew.
3. Add a photo. The non-conformity should be visible; if the person’s face is not needed, keep it out of the frame.
4. Record the intervention. Was the worker warned, was the equipment put on, was work stopped?
5. Inform the person responsible. Have the crew lead and, if necessary, the OHS specialist been told?
6. Check the next day. See whether it happens again in the same crew and add an instruction note if needed.

A short example entry: “OHS: Block C west façade scaffold, 07:40, a worker from the structural crew climbed up without a hard hat. Warned, hard hat put on. Crew lead informed.” These three sentences are the answer, three weeks later, to the question “has this happened before?”

Tracking site accidents: how does an incident record flow?

A non-conformity on the daily list and an incident are not the same thing. A work accident, a near miss that causes no injury or a dangerous situation is opened separately as an incident record and tracked until closure. A good workflow has five steps:

1. Record the incident: type, location, time, crew and people involved, photo and first response.
2. Investigate: establish the conditions at the time, the witnesses and how the work was organised.
3. Find the root cause: “the worker did not wear a hard hat” is a surface cause; hard hats not being available on site, no instruction being given or a lack of supervision may be the root cause.
4. Assign actions: link an owner and a target date to each root cause.
5. Close with evidence: close the incident with a photo, report or record showing that the action was taken.

What does Turkish law say? What we read in Law No. 6331

The summaries below are based on the text of Turkey’s Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 on mevzuat.gov.tr, as read on 23 October 2026:

• Art. 4: The employer is obliged to ensure employees’ health and safety in relation to work; it monitors and inspects whether the measures taken are followed and ensures that non-conformities are remedied.
• Art. 10: The employer determines the measures to be taken as a result of the risk assessment and the protective equipment or gear to be used.
• Art. 14: The employer keeps a record of all work accidents and prepares reports after carrying out the necessary investigations. It also investigates and reports on incidents that did not cause injury or death but caused damage or had the potential to cause harm. Work accidents are notified to the Social Security Institution (SGK) within three working days after the accident.
• Art. 19: Employees are obliged to use the personal protective equipment provided to them correctly, and to inform the employer or the employee representative immediately when they encounter a serious and imminent danger or a shortcoming in protective measures.

These articles show why the daily record is not just paperwork: monitoring, remedying non-conformities and recording incidents are part of the employer’s responsibility. Which form is used for which job, in what format and with which notification method is a matter for separate regulations and the nature of your work; clarify this with your OHS specialist and workplace physician. Here we have only read the articles of the Law listed above.

End-of-day OHS record checklist for the office

If the form is reviewed once more at the office after it has been filled in on site, the records become more reliable. Before closing the day, ask these questions:

• Was the checklist completed today for every area, and if not, was the reason written down?
• Does every non-conformity opened have an owner and a target date?
• Have yesterday’s open actions been closed, and has a note been added for those that have not?
• If there was an incident, near miss or work stoppage during the day, was a separate incident record opened?
• Do the photos match the right records?
• In records that do not need a person’s name, was only the crew name written?

The last question was added deliberately: in daily records it is often unnecessary to write the employee’s name. Once a non-conformity is linked to a crew and a location, measures can be taken; a name should only be kept when an incident investigation requires it, and in a record that only authorised people can see.

Paper forms and WhatsApp for daily checks: where they work and where they break

If there is a disciplined site chief who fills in the form every morning and hands it in every evening, a paper form and a WhatsApp message do the job well enough. The breaking points are usually these:

• The form gets filled in, but a separate incident record is never opened for the non-conformity.
• The photo is kept in one place and the form in another; matching them up later is hard.
• Nobody knows who holds the action or whether it has been closed.
• There are no weekly or monthly totals; the question “how many times has the same non-conformity recurred?” goes unanswered.
• The incident gets lost among hundreds of lines in the evening report.

OHS records with SahaSesi AI and KurumsalPortal

In SahaSesi AI, the foreman writes “Worker went up the scaffold without a hard hat” or leaves a voice message; the record is read back to the foreman as “Logged: OHS incident, scaffold access without a hard hat”. Work accidents, work stoppages and inspection visits are recorded separately; the OHS incident appears in red at the very top of the evening report. We recommend that your office checks OHS records before using them.

For incident analysis and action tracking, KurumsalPortal’s OHS Incident / Near Miss Management module records work accidents, near misses and dangerous situations with location and photos; it supports root cause analysis, assigns corrective actions to an owner and tracks them through to closure with evidence. These records are for internal tracking and do not replace the notification to SGK. SahaSesi AI is being rolled out on its first sites through a pilot programme.

If you would like to start your daily OHS records from WhatsApp and see them at the top of the evening report, you can schedule a pilot meeting on the SahaSesi AI page.