The Six Essential Elements of a Digitized, Integrated Health and Safety Management Solution

The effects of COVID on the safety management software market

Safety management is a mature field, safety management software solutions having been on the market for some time now. Indeed, only 10 per cent of EHS executives have no plans to use software for safety hazards and risk mitigation, according to independent research firm, Verdantixⁱ.

Despite near-saturation being reached, the safety management market has still been upended by the pandemic. The principal effect being a rapid uptick in customers deploying safety solutions offering functionality across incident management, risk management, audits and inspections, safety program management, and/or safety related training and developmentⁱⁱ.

These solutions, though, are evidence of mature safety cultures at the organizations that procured them. 

How so? Thanks to technology innovation, the organizations in question can now distribute safety material broadly; they can also place greater responsibility on employees to report on safety incidents; and with that greater responsibility comes positive improvements in worker safety behaviorⁱⁱⁱ.

What innovations? Mobile-based solutions, in particular, have come of age, notes Verdantix. These solutions support real-time notifications and two-way communication to ensure that safety best practices are top of mind irrespective of where employees work. But that’s not the only innovation worth noting. 

Digitization is getting better

As analysts^iv have relayed, safety providers are also exploiting gains from wider digital trends. These digital trends are bringing knowledge of worker readiness to employers, helping safety leaders make decisions based on actual data.

Such digitization is enabling improved compliance visibility, even among field workers. It’s also helping to minimize the risk of safety incidents, regulatory sanction, and reputational damage.

By what mechanisms?

Allowing for process optimization, the resultant digital safety management platforms assist employers working towards greater productivity and workforce accountability. Digital functionality also serves to promote faster, more secure access to facilities. 

What’s more, the results of these digital innovations have been significant time saved on administrative tasks. Inspection time has also been cut down. And that’s because of the rise of analytics and reporting aimed at enhancing the context, awareness, and analysis of key decisions in real time.

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, which have been used by practitioners to prove the efficiency of the safety operation to executive decision makers.

Core elements of a fully integrated digitized workforce management solution

Of course, not every employer has made the digital transition. Indeed, the majority might still be reliant on manual processes supplemented by cumbersome legacy solutions. 

Indeed, incumbents remain dominant. Their customers, in turn, often decry the failure to enjoy the benefits of fully integrated, digitized workforce management for health and safety. And so, for customers who’ve yet to make a full digital transition, the subsequent guide lays out the six essential elements of a digitized, integrated health and safety management system, needed to bolster safety maturity: 

1. Contractor management 

Regulation often dictates that third-party workers are due the same safety protections as their full-time counterparts. That duty of care obligation has become all the more difficult to maintain due to the pandemic.

Fortunately, mature safety programs have been implementing revised industry best practices with the help of enhanced contractor safety management solutions.

These enhanced 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, these solutions empower contractors to serve themselves, by using end-to-end safety management software to participate in Safety initiatives.

Here, contractor self-registration functionality 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 the enhanced functionality, 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.

Further digital functionality includes:

• Streamline the onboarding of entities, workers, as well as plans and equipment
• Share the compliance workload with contractor managers and workers
• Centralize the storage of contractor information in the cloud
• Implement scored pre-qualification processes to ensure contractors meet organizational requirements
• Request documents from entities to track insurances, certificates, licenses, registrations, and plans
• Manage a contractor plan through the upload of plan details, documents, and questionnaires
• Monitor worker compliance by enabling assignment of inductions and competencies for upload
• Automate follow ups through configurable workflows to support contractors to remain compliant
• Capture case notes and actions assigned to contractor workers
• Record details of contractor engagements as part of contractor performance management
• Improve compliance onsite through access control checks
• Search contractor entities based on their service offerings and location
• Broadcast notifications to contractors using templated messages via SMS and voice
• Visualize the status of contractors using real-time analytics
• Generate configurable reports and distribute to personnel

2. Lone worker management

Similarly, the pandemic has exacerbated lone worker health and safety risk, while simultaneously swelling the ranks of lone worker populations working at increased risk. Unsurprisingly, lone workers admit feeling less safe, particularly when out of connectivity range with their employers^v.

Mature safety programs, in their turn, have been able to provide support to personnel working alone by digital means – enabling those workers to create lone worker sessions, assigning workers a guardian, and other means of checking in on them at regular intervals.

Further digital functionality has enabled:

• Reduction in barriers for personnel to request lone worker sessions using simple and intuitive forms
• Simplification of check-ins by enabling personnel to respond by clicking a link in an SMS
• Planning of resources ahead of time by enabling lone worker sessions to be requested for future dates
• Enablement of personnel and/or guardians to set the automatic check-in frequency
• Automatic escalation of notifications to a guardian when a worker does not check in
• Generation of predictive analytics by understanding when work sites typically have higher volumes of requests

3. Incident and injury management

But when incidents do occur, with lone workers or others, safety teams must be able to capture incident event details and follow the status of a given incident through to its resolution. It’s a pre-requisite for effective compliance.

Mature safety operations have managed to do this, using digital safety solutions to analyze safety incidents within platforms themselves, as well as identifying root causes and extracting lessons learned.

Keen on driving continuous improvement, these safety teams are also using digital software solutions to go beyond the identification of lessons – disseminating learnings and assigning corrective and preventive actions, as well.

The solutions give mature safety teams the opportunity to capture and analyze near-miss events, as well. The analysis of these events are crucial to sussing out stresses in the system before they turn into safety incidents.

Nor has injury management been ignored. 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.

Such an 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.

4. Compliance management

Near miss or not, safety incidents often stem for underlying risks.

Yet, organizations often splurge on separate safety incident management and risk and compliance tools. Not only are expenses higher that way; but when incidents do happen, the systems rarely share relevant information, delaying incident response.

Mature safety teams avoid the cost and accelerate the response via a suite of integrated, digital tools to collect risk data from across the organization – from a range of stakeholders, in real time, and based on international ISO standards.

With everything pre-customizable, from the simple pre-task assessment through to the organizational risk register, these digital tools make it easy to capture risk data and provide the analytics needed to derive rich insights.

Relevant digital functionality, here, includes:

• Audits and inspections. Easily manage safety audits and inspections using a library of best-practice templates to get started fast. Safety teams can also make the templates their own by adding unique requirements and additions.
• Take 5. Provide personnel in the field a simple and easy to use tool to assess risk before tasks begin, then collate Take-5 data to gain insights into operational risks.
• Standards compliance. Monitor compliance against ISO, legislative, and industry standards. Abide by best-practice standards, including ISO 45001, ISO 27001, and more. 

5. Fatigue and wellbeing management

Employee mental health and wellbeing has been a casualty of the pandemic. And the turbocharged mental health crisis has in turn exacerbated safety risk to employers. Too often, though, wellbeing issues are falling out of the remit of safety teams and pre-existing safety processes.

To counter this, mature safety teams have become reliant on integrated digital, wellbeing management systems. These tools 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.

Further digital functionality includes:

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting 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 HR software

6. Visitor and access management

As a result of the pandemic, visitor management has become an increasing part of maintaining workplace health and safety. It’s now incumbent on organizations to reduce COVID risk with effective visitor management protocols; and such measures are likely to include requiring visitors to answer screening questions when signing in.

Here, digital integrated technology has helped. Relevant capabilities work to streamline the overall visitor sign in process using a QR code on a form tailored to the organization.

Visitors can also complete inductions, answer questions, and acknowledge content, then have notifications triggered to their host based on the response. Once on site, safety teams can use digital functionality to manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications, and understand visitor trends to better optimize protocols.

 Further digital functionality includes:

• Contact tracing of visitors that have COVID symptoms, have travelled to known hotspots, or have close contacts who have tested positive.
• Manage all visitor incident communications to ensure timely notifications of critical events to staff and stakeholders, via email, SMS, voice message, or in-app.
• Automated host notifications to ensure that hosts are notified when visitors arrive, so they can be ready to greet them. 

Finally, by using digital safety management software, mature safety employers are planning for events like COVID by putting best-practice processes (such as those recommended by the WHO and CDC) in place ahead of time, then testing the processes to ensure they are effective. 

Their digital safety management solutions also facilitating planning, enabling organizations to conduct risk assessments to understand their level of exposure to safety risks and identify controls that can be used to manage the risk ahead of time.

Why else does digitization matter? Given the increasing length and severity of safety incidents, it’s becomes more important than ever for organizations to audit and inspect the controls they have in place to ensure they remain effective. Organizations have also needed to have their risk assessments periodically reviewed to reflect the effectiveness of their controls; only safety management systems, like Noggin, have been able to facilitate.

WHS software built in line with the latest industry standards, these solutions are crucial to mature safety programs. They provide all the tools needed to automate the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) management cycle in a centralized, easy-to-use platform, increasing organizational efficiency with powerful automation capabilities and freeing up personnel from administrative tasks to get more substantive work done sooner.

Sources

i. Chris Sayers and Bill Pennington, Verdantix: Buyer’s Guide: Safety Management Software 2021.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Tom Brown and Bill Pennington, Verdantix Strategic Focus: The Role Of Technology In Behaviour Based Safety Management Programmes.

iv. 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-effective-management-and-reduces-risk.

v. 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-lone-workers-struggled-to-get-help-after-accident.