A new year means new resolutions. And if you’re leading a safety team, one of yours should be digitization.
Why’s that? Well, a Track Via survey found that manual processes hurt quality control and increase costs.
If that's not enough to prompt digitzation, what are the other reasons to digitize safety management in 2024?
Improvements in digital safety management
Indeed, poor quality control and ballooning costs aren’t the only reasons to digitize safety management in 2024. Your team also risks losing the positive ROI that comes from digital safety management.
For one, next-gen safety management platforms are bringing more advanced knowledge of worker readiness to employers, while helping safety leaders make decisions based on real-time data.
Digital innovation brings other benefits, too, such as time saved on administrative tasks. In particular, the rise of analytics and context-specific reporting have helped cut down inspection time, as well.
Reasons to digitize safety management today
But those aren’t the only reasons to digitize safety management this year. Another four reasons to consider include:
1. Cut down on incidents and injuries
Safety incidents and injuries remain stubbornly high. Worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually, according to data from the ILO.
Digitization can help. Relevant technology enables teams to better analyze safety incidents within platforms, as well as identify root causes and extract lessons learned.
Digitization has expedited injury management, too. Built-in digital communications and collaboration features now ensure that teams can respond quickly when an injury occurs, by automatically sharing important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel.
2. Communicate better when it counts
Indeed, these built-in communications capabilities let teams quickly collaborate and share information in real time, particularly when it matters most.
For their part, managers get access to records of control approvals and can monitor inbound and outbound incident communications and responses.
And that’s not all. Digital safety management technology will also let managers automate sending incident updates, decisions, facts, and assumptions as well as enable field workers to automatically escalate communications based on incident severity.
3. Keep regulators off your back
Then, there’s compliance. The traditional bugbear of safety management, compliance is complicated by manual processes that make following an audit trail harder than it needs to be.
Add to that, regulators such as OSHA are making explicit moves toward requiring digital record keeping.
Digitizing safety management keeps you ahead of the compliance curve. Digital technologies come equipped with workflows that make compliance inherent.
New regulations on the books? Those platforms are flexible enough to let users build new mandatory approval flows for new compliance drivers.
4. Improved contractor and competence management
Despite digitization, safety management is still about people. Fortunately, digitization makes managing those people easier, particularly your contractors.
For one, digital technology reduces the administrative load of contractor management, by empowering contractors to serve themselves and participate in initiatives within the app.
On the competence management front, digital technology serves a centralizing function. That helps safety managers share the responsibility of keeping information up to date with multiple stakeholders.
Digital technologies also provide cross-reference competencies with role requirements to ensure Managers have competent people to enable safe and efficient operations.
Now that you understand the reasons to digitize safety management in 2024, you’ll need the right platform to take you to the next level.
Not sure what’s the right safety management platform for your needs? Download our Work Safety Management Software Buyer’s Guide to learn which capabilities you can’t live without.
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