From shortages of supplies and workers to rising costs, the world economy isn’t in the best place. Safety programs, in their turn, have likewise been affected. Teams are being forced to do more with less – fewer people and safety resources. What can they do? Digitizing the end-to-end safety program is one way to keep workers safe and employers in compliance. How to go about digitizing your safety program?
Platforms to help in digitizing an end-to-end safety program
Here, digital safety management software can help. How, so?
Next-generation platforms boast functionality tailored to digitizing the implementation of best-practice safety management standards, such as ISO 45001 and ISO 45003, as well as related standards, including ISO 9001 (quality management) and ISO 14001 (environmental management).
Implemented, maintained, and updated effectively, these standards provide the basis for a well-functioning, end-to-end safety management system.
But there’s more.
Wellbeing practices can be digitized, too, as part of the same integrated safety management program. And here, again, digital platforms come in handy.
More specifically, functionality within these platforms can help organizations (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, and (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.
Capabilities that help in digitizing safety management
Of course, not all platforms are created equal. Digitizing wellbeing management (specifically) and safety management (more generally) requires a specific set of capabilities.
What capabilities matter? When it comes to wellbeing management, consider the following:
- Gain situational awareness of current events impacting on personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
- 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
- Triage 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
- Customize initiatives based on current events or unique organizational requirements
- Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
- Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
- Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content
- Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from your HR Software
Beyond that, digital platforms should also participate in basic safety management objectives, such as decreasing rates of workplace injuries and illnesses. Relevant capabilities for digitizing generic safety management processes include the following:
Incident management
Effectively report and manage all environmental, health, and safety incidents.
Injury management
Built-in communication and collaboration features to ensure quick responses when an injury occurs. Automatically share important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel, so that return-to-work coordinators can focus on supporting the injured worker. This will reduce insurance premiums by decreasing the amount of money spent returning personnel to work.
Online inductions
Streamline your induction process by enabling inductions to be completed online on any device. This will enable organizations to track the status of all inductions in one location across multiple sites in real time.
Reporting and analytics
Empower data-driven work safety decisions across the organization using real-time analytics. Generate safety reports ad hoc or regularly and export to external stakeholders.
Finally, in this age of escalating safety challenges, keeping staff safe takes more effort than ever before.
Manual interventions no longer suffice. Safety teams will have to step up. Digitizing the end-to-end program is the only way how. And so, for more on the digital capabilities that can help, download our Buyer’s Guide to Safety Management Software.