Safety teams are responsible for managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of controls. The technological element that helps is safety management software.
But in an era of escalating safety threats, many aren’t sure what features that software should have.
Read on to learn the five essential features of safety management software.
Defining work safety management software
But first, what’s work safety management software in the first place?
The industry consensus definition of work safety management software is a digital tool designed to help organizations manage and improve their workplace safety and compliance.
Most often these solutions digitize and centralize safety data in a single source of truth to help with the following organizational pain points:
- Identifying and managing safety risks
- Tracking nonconformances
- Assigning corrective and preventive actions
- Providing the tools for employee training
- Recordkeeping
What advanced work safety management software features are needed?
Any number of digital solutions might fit under that over-broad definition. And so, safety leaders, in the real world, are likely to demand more advanced capabilities, particularly as the health and safety risk their employees face grows.
Indeed, safety compliance remains a thorny area. Nor have other perennial issues for safety teams, such as contractor management and lone-worker risk, gone away.
Add to those, the mental health and wellbeing in the workplace crises have more recently begun to bedevil business leaders, compromising retention and sapping worker productivity.
Essential features of work safety management software
What essential features are therefore needed to run a mature safety program? We count the following five:
Incident management
The bread and butter of work safety management, incident management capabilities are needed in work safety management software to elevate hazard and incident reporting with seamless reporting from any device.
The essential feature also helps to instantly notify personnel and assign actions using prebuilt plans, oversee injury and return-to-work processes, leverage industry templates for investigations, and manage tasks to prevent reoccurrence.
Risk management
Similarly, as risk accelerates, work safety management software will be needed to more effectively manage that risk using multiple approaches or operational risk registers (to manage risks at a strategic level.)
Compliance management
The same goes for escalating safety compliance demands that can only be met by increasing alignment and driving compliance using controlled documents, managing contractors using questionnaires and document reviews, and following up with inspections and audits to ensure controls are implemented and risks are managed on an ongoing basis.
Wellbeing management
As the wellbeing crisis heats up, too, wellbeing features within work safety management software will play an essential role in supporting employees and contractors with the ability to raise duress alarms from their devices if they need immediate support, create confidential wellbeing support requests, or conduct ergonomic assessments to ensure a safe environment at work or in the home office.
Analytics and reporting
Underlying it all are increasing demands for real-time data. To that end, analytics and reporting capabilities with work safety management software must do their part by consolidating data to gain valuable insights and visualize information through interactive dashboards, charts, and maps in real-time.
Finally, the BCI Horizon Scan Report for 2023 reported that health and safety incidents remain top business risks. Safety teams, as such, still have their work cut out for them. And work safety management software will be a key component of getting that work done.
What other capabilities should these solutions carry, though? To learn more, download our Safety Software Buyer’s Guide.
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