By now, you’ve probably heard the many reasons to digitize work safety management. For one, running a paper-based safety program, even for the most budget-conscious business, no longer makes financial sense.
The research bears this out. For instance, survey data from the construction industry revealed that manual processes can lead to increased costs.
Indeed, nearly 90% of respondents to a TrackVia survey said they spent a staggering 1,300 hours per year assembling data into a usable format. A major consequence of this being: nearly two thirds of managers said that manual processes were causing misplacement of work orders.
Meanwhile, almost 60% of respondents said that they received incomplete and poor-quality data through manual data collection.
The benefits of work safety management software
Incomplete and poor-quality data have major audit and compliance implications.
And then, there’s productivity foregone from not going digital. More specifically, paper-based safety programs stand to lose out on the advanced knowledge of worker readiness that work safety management software brings employers. That knowledge helps safety leaders make decisions based on real-time data.
Add to that, digital safety management solutions are leading to serious gains in time saved on administrative tasks and inspection time.
Essential elements of work safety management software
The question arises, then, what software elements are needed to recoup these digital benefits? To answer that pressing query, we’ve composed the following article which lays out the eight essential elements of safety management software.
Here they are:
1. Analytics and reporting
Underreporting is rife within the safety industry. And manual processes only exacerbate the issue, particularly when workers lack the ability to report incidents, hazards, and observations when they’re in the field.
Analytics and reporting are, therefore, essential elements of a safety management system. With them, workers are able to capture a whole range of event report types, including safety, environmental, near misses, injuries, security, compliance, complaints, suggestions, etc.
Workers can also create custom reports as PDF or Word documents and share them with stakeholders.
That reporting capability specifically empowers informed decision-making and strengthens resilience, as data is consolidated, leading to valuable insights being gleaned and visualized through interactive dashboards, charts, and maps in real time.
2. Incident management
Responding to safety incidents remains a core Safety competence, making incident management another essential element of work safety management software and seamless reporting from any device to escalate hazards and incidents a key software capability.
Digital incident management functionality enables teams 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 reoccurrences.
3. Illness and injury
Safety teams must also respond to worker illnesses and injuries. This makes illness and injury management a third essential element of work safety management software.
Relevant digital capabilities can enable personnel to report health and safety incidents, triage and categorize incidents to inform the level of investigation required, conduct investigations, capture damage reports, assign actions, capture lessons learned, share those lessons learned with safety alerts, and manage incidents through each stage of their lifecycle while keeping all stakeholders informed with automated notifications.
Meanwhile, digital injury management functionality allows for the management of workers compensation and injury management across multiple jurisdictions through injury categorization, tracking medical certificates, medical expenses, remittances, and return-to-work plans to help achieve return-to-work goals.
4. Inspections and investigations
Inspections and investigations remain core Safety competencies, too, making them essential elements of work safety management software.
But to be comprehensive, a safety platform should enable inspectors to complete inspections by answering questions, making comments, uploading supporting documents and photos, then creating corrective actions where required.
The same goes for investigations. To prevent incident recurrence and reduce incident consequences, teams should have the ability to conduct investigations digitally into safety incidents using ICAM, 5 whys, or other methodologies of their choosing.
5. Risk management
Of course, these methodologies are tactical ways of managing risk, making risk management another essential element of work safety management software. Digital solutions should, therefore, carry a range of tools including Take 5, Job Hazard Analysis, Safe Work Method Statements, Permits to Work, Bow Tie, and other general risk assessments.
6. Compliance management
Compliance is another bread-and-butter safety activity, making digital compliance management an essential element of work safety management software. Digital tools, for their part, should be able to provide an audit trail and keep organizations on the right side of safety rules and regulations.
How to do it? Crucial to ensuring compliance is digital functionality to track compliance obligations then create goals, objectives, and targets as well as put programs in place to manage compliance over time including the tracking of breaches.
7. Contractor management
Third parties are often indispensable to the safety function. What’s more, COVID-19, with its associated worker shortages and supply-chain disruptions, precipitated stark changes in the already fraught contractor relationship, forcing all parties involved in the ecosystem, including hosts, contractors, and subcontractors, to implement modifications – sometimes overnight.
As a result, contractor management, an essential element of a safety management system, has only gotten more complex. Therefore, digital solutions must now come equipped with enhanced functionality to enable organizations to better manage the end-to-end contractor lifecycle, from pre-qualification and onboarding through to performance management and contract closure, based on an organization’s unique requirements.
These capabilities also serve to ease the administrative burden associated with safety management. How so? Solutions empower contractors to serve themselves and participate in safety initiatives.
Digitized contractor self-registration functionality, specifically, enables contractors to maintain their own company details online, including insurances, inductions, and competencies, simply by clicking a link in an invitation email or scanning a QR code.
8. Wellbeing management
The pandemic also turbocharged the mental health crisis, which is now spilling over into the workplace with escalating rates of worker burnout.
Following from this, wellbeing management has become the final, essential component of work safety software, with businesses needing functionality to respond to mental health and wellbeing events, implement proactive initiatives to support personnel, and better understand opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.
At a more granular level, organizations should be able to use digital wellbeing management capabilities to more easily confront the physical and emotional wellbeing challenges of managing distributed workforces, while keeping themselves in compliance with duty of care obligations to mitigate psychosocial hazards to their workers.
An overview of relevant capabilities includes:
- Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice
- Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice so that they can triage their response to events
- Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
- Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
Finally, digital safety software, of which this article has provided the eight essential elements, has moved from a nice to have to need to have. And that’s because businesses who remain stubbornly manual risk losing time, productivity, and efficiency, while compromising worker health and compliance.
But how to start streamlining safety compliance, boosting organizational efficiency, and integrating crucial elements of a safety management system today? Request a demonstration of Noggin’s award-winning work safety management software to stay agile and adapt to emerging challenges.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)