Ten Reasons to Digitize Safety Management

Manual processes hurt quality control, increase costs

The pandemic, if anything, demonstrated the importance of Health and Safety to business resilience. But business resilience, as it turns out, isn’t just maintained from workers avoiding illness.

Employers must also ensure that their day-to-day efforts are making workers safer, the company more resilient, and themselves free of regulatory sanction.

How’s that going so far? Well, survey data suggest employers still have a way to go. And a major culprit for this underperformance is the persistence of manual processes in Safety Management.

The TrackVia surveyⁱ of 500 safety managers and executives found that manual processes were not only hurting quality control but increasing costs.

Digging deeper, nearly 90 per cent of respondents told survey-takers that they spent a staggering 1,300 hours per year assembling data into a usable formatⁱⁱ. A major consequence of this: nearly two thirds of managers said that manual processes were causing misplacement of work ordersⁱⁱⁱ.

Meanwhile, almost 60 per cent said that they received incomplete and poor-quality data through manual data collection^iv.

How prolific were manual systems themselves? In the construction industry, where the survey data issue, nearly half of all managers were still using manual systems for data collection, incurring the risk that maintaining patchwork manual systems entails^v. 

Digitization in Safety Management is getting better

Of course, poor quality control and unneeded expense aren’t the only risks of manual Safety processes. Teams are also missing out on the positive ROI that comes from digitization. After all, digital solutions for Safety Management have improved markedly.

As analysts^vi have noted, safety management solution vendors have been exploiting wider digital trends to improve the capabilities of their solutions. 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?

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.

What’s more, the benefits these digital innovations bring can be significant, particularly time saved on administrative tasks. And because of the rise of analytics and reporting aimed at enhancing the context, awareness, and analysis of key decisions in real time, inspection time has been cut, too.

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.

Benefits of digitization in Safety Management

But what are the specific benefits of digitization for Safety Management? The subsequent guide lays out the ten most significant.

1. Expedited incident and injury management

Digitization of Safety Management enables teams to better analyze safety incidents within platforms, as well as identify root causes, and extract lessons learned.

Injury management has been expedited, too. Built-in digital communication and collaboration features, for instance, ensure that teams can respond quickly when an injury occurs, by automatically sharing important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel.

This digitized approach makes it easier for return-to-work coordinators to focus on supporting injured workers, reduce insurance premiums, and lower the amount of money spent returning personnel to work.

2. Facilitating critical communications

One of the mechanisms that expedites incident and injury management is improved critical communications. Digitization in Safety Management 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.

Indeed, digital technologies often come equipped with chat, email, SMS, and voice messaging capabilities that serve to quickly inform, collaborate, and share information in real time. Managers have access to records of control approvals and can monitor inbound and outbound incident communications and responses.

The systems themselves often 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. Ensure compliance

In many jurisdictions^vii, regulators have moved the mandated reporting of workplace illnesses and injuries to digital formats, rendering organizations reliant on manual reporting methods out of compliance and their leadership liable to fines.

Even when digital reporting isn’t mandated, though, digitization helps to ensure compliance. That’s because many digital technologies come equipped with workflows that make compliance inherent. When those platforms don’t, they’re often flexible enough to let users build new mandatory approval flows for new compliance drivers.

Workers in the field, as a result, spend less time finding approval shortcuts and more time improving control quality.

4. Improved competence management

Digitization also serves to ensure that teams assign their best people to carry out Safety tasks based on documented prior experience carrying out similar tasks.

How so? Well, personnel competencies are managed in a central location where Safety Managers can 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.

What’s more, digitization works to enable personnel to upload their own competencies, thereby easing the workload on Managers who can simply verify competencies before they are accepted. This also enables 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.

5. 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, digitization helps 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. Relevant capabilities, here, include:

• 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 HR software

6. Address lone worker risk

Similarly, the pandemic has exacerbated lone worker health and safety risk, while simultaneously swelling the ranks of lone workers operating at increased risk.

Unsurprisingly, lone workers admit feeling less safe, particularly when out of connectivity range with their employers^viii.

And so, digitization benefits organizations by enabling employers to provide support to personnel working alone. Thanks to digital technology, those workers can 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 enables personnel to respond by clicking a link in an SMS.

Further benefits of digitization in lone-worker management include:

• Allows organizations to plan out resources ahead of time by enabling lone worker sessions to be requested for future dates
• Better enables personnel and/or guardians who can pre-set automatic check-in frequency
• Automatically escalates notifications to a guardian when a worker doesn’t check in
• Generates predictive analytics by understanding when work sites typically have higher volumes of requests

7. Mitigate underreporting

Pervasive safety underreporting is also mitigated thanks to digitization.

Indeed, digitization addresses one of the main causes of safety underreporting, i.e., the overall reluctance on part of workers to generate incident reports^ix. When workers do, their (manual) reports often provide too little (or no) insight on how to prevent the incident from happening again^x.

Here, digitization makes reporting easier for workers in the field, with easy-to-use, responsive incident reporting capabilities. These reporting capabilities are robust, enabling field workers to capture a whole range of event report types, including safety, environmental, near misses, injuries, security, compliance, complaints, suggestions, etc. 

8. Improved contractor management

Regulation often dictates that third-party workers are due the same safety protections as their full-time counterparts.

Fortunately, digitization of contractor management enables 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.

Security teams, in their turn, benefit from this digitization, as well – empowered by the ability to verify contractors permitted on site more quickly.

Digital functionality is also enabling a streamlined, online induction process, accessible to contractors and full-time workers alike, on any device. Mature safety teams are thus enabled to track the status of all inductions in one location, in real time even when the inductions happen across multiple sites.

Relevant capabilities include:

• Streamlines the onboarding of entities, workers, as well as plans and equipment
• Shares the compliance workload with contractor managers and workers
• Centralizes the storage of contractor information in the cloud
• Implements scored pre-qualification organizational requirements
• Requests documents from entities to track insurances, certificates, licenses, registrations, and plans
• Manages a contractor plan through the upload of plan details, documents, and questionnaires
• Monitors worker compliance by enabling assignment of inductions and competencies for upload
• Automates follow ups through configurable workflows to support contractors to remain compliant
• Captures case notes and actions assigned to contractor workers
• Records details of contractor engagements as part of contractor performance management
• Improves compliance onsite through access control checks
• Searches contractor entities based on their service offerings and location
• Broadcasts notifications to contractors using templated messages via SMS and voice
• Visualizes the status of contractors using real-time analytics
• Generates configurable reports and distribute to personnel

9.  Better follow through

Digitization, as has been noted, can lead to automation through powerful workflows, one of the main benefits of which is standardization of work scopes. The standardization of work scopes also goes hand in hand with being better able to track and catalog hazards and mitigation processes through digital libraries of reusable, approved content. Both benefits of digitization serve to promote better Safety follow through. 

10. Promote safety culture

Last but not least, investing in Safety digitization to optimize processes signals to employees that their safety matter. And employees will respond in kind with improved loyalty and productivity. To the extent that digitization also promotes competency management, the best people will get put forward in a transparent manner, further improving worker morale.

Conclusion

Finally, safety cultures achieved through digitization tend to yield best-in-breed Safety processes. And since digitization promotes visibility and transparency, those processes are always being optimized, with technologies, such as Noggin Safety, going beyond the identification of lessons to disseminating learnings and assigning corrective and preventive actions, as well.

It’s this cycle of constant improvement, whereby every drop of efficiency is wrung out, that enables digitized Safety programs to ensure all-around business resilience.

Managers of those programs keep learning from data. They also have the reporting chops to attract senior-leadership sponsorship and generate so many productive work-hours from their employees in the field.

Sources

i. Construction Business Owner: Survey from TrackVia Finds Manual Processes Hurt Quality Control & Costs on Jobsites. Available at https://www.constructionbusinessowner.com/news/survey-trackviafinds-manual-processes-hurt-quality-control-costs-jobsites.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Ibid.

v. Ibid.

vi. Nisha Lathif, ISHN: Strategic Focus: The Role Of Technology In Behaviour Based Safety Management Programmes. Available at https://www.ishn.com/articles/112721-digitization-drives-effectivemanagement-and-reduces-risk.

vii. Occupational Safety and Health Administration: 1904.41 - Electronic submission of Employer Identification Number (EIN) and injury and illness records to OSHA. Available at https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1904/1904.41.

viii. To this end, fewer than 32 per cent of employers confirmed that they were able to track the location of their lone workers once out of range, according to survey data. EHS Today: Almost 1/5 of Lone Workers Struggled to Get Help After Accident. Available at https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/article/21234316/almost-15-of-loneworkers-struggled-to-get-help-after-accident.

ix. Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplacesafetyincident-reporting/.

x. Ibid.