As analysts have noted, safety management solutions have been exploiting wider digital trends. These trends are significant, including bringing more advanced knowledge of worker readiness to employers and helping safety leaders make decisions based on real-time data.
By what mechanisms?
Safety management software keeps getting better
Allowing for process optimization, digital safety management platforms are mightily assisting employers working towards greater productivity and workforce accountability. Their digital functionality also serves to promote faster, more secure access to facilities, as well as time (and cost) saved on administrative tasks and field work alike.
Further digital functionality has also led to improvements in the detection of meaningful trends within large quantities of data, as well as the automation of safety reporting. Those factors have helped Safety leaders prove the efficiency of their operations to executive decision makers.
But beyond broad trends, what are the specific critical features to look for in a safety management software tool?
Key features to look for in safety management software
We'll lay out the top five:
1. Collaboration tools
One of the key mechanisms that expedites incident and injury management, the goal of most Safety programs, is improved critical communications. And so, a critical feature to have is collaboration that enables teams to better manage complex communications in a centralized system (a single source of truth) that provides effective communication pathways for all aspects of incident management.
Here, built-in chat, email, SMS, and voice messaging capabilities come in handy to quickly inform, collaborate, and share information in real time. That way Managers have access to records of control approvals and can monitor inbound and outbound incident communications and responses.
2. Competency management
Digitization in Safety Management should also serve toensure that teams assign their best people to carry out Safety tasks based on documented prior experience carrying out similar tasks. A critical software feature, therefore, would enable personnel competencies to be managed in a central location where Safety Managers can share the responsibility of keeping information up to date with multiple stakeholders.
To that end, competency management capabilities provide cross-reference competencies with role requirements to ensure Managers have competent people to enable safe and efficient operations. This critical feature-set enables personnel to upload their own competencies, thereby easing the workload on Managers who can simply verify competencies before they are accepted. This also helps Managers to gain better insight into potential competency gaps by cross-checking against role requirements.
From there, Managers get a better understanding of current and future competency gaps to enable proactive upskilling in-line with needs.
3. Wellbeing management for distributed workforces
Employee mental health and wellbeing have been casualties of the pandemic. The turbocharged mental health crisis has, in turn, exacerbated safety risk to employers.
To counter this, wellbeing management capabilities help organizations (1) better respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support personnel, and (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement, wherever their workers may be.
Digitization of wellbeing also enables teams to gain situational awareness of current events impacting personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds.
4. Lone-worker risk management
Similarly, the pandemic has exacerbated lone worker health and safety risk, leaving lone workers feeling less safe.
And so, lone-worker risk management capabilities enable employers to provide support to personnel working alone, by letting those workers create lone worker sessions and/or be assigned guardians or other means of regular check in.
Advanced digitization of forms also reduces the barriers for personnel to request lone worker sessions, while the simplification of check in’s enable personnel to respond by clicking a link in an SMS.
5. Contractor management
Regulation often dictates that third-party workers are due the same safety protections as their full-time counterparts.
Fortunately, contractor management capabilities 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.
How, exactly?
Reducing the administrative load of contractor management, digital technology empowers contractors to serve themselves, by using end-to-end safety management software to participate in Safety initiatives.
Digital contractor self-registration functionality, specifically, enables contractors to maintain their own company details online, including insurances and competencies, simply by clicking a link in an invitation email or scanning a QR code.
Of course, those five critical features aren’t the only to look for in a safety management tool. For the rest, download our Safety Management Software Buyer’s Guide.
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