Few employers would disagree that their workers are their greatest assets and that their safety and well-being are crucial concerns for the organization. However, to prioritize safety management in today's operating environments, firms should design and implement an effective safety management program supported by the proper technologies and systems.
This article explores the considerations around prioritizing your organization’s safety management processes and programs, and how an environmental and health safety (EHS) solution can help provide scaffolding for these safety risk mitigation efforts.
Organization-wide Access to Unified Safety Resources
Workplace safety may be a shared responsibility for everyone in the organization, but provisioning the proper platform to facilitate safety programs and processes is a strategic management decision of the firm. Organizations that decide on implementing environmental health and safety (EHS) software are making a compelling stance regarding its prioritization of employee health and safety; this initial step involves organizing and automating safety processes in a centralized platform like an EHS, strategically practicing prevention effectively while at the same time handling ongoing incidents and events, as they transpire.
By using a centralized platform for safety management, you can involve people from different parts of the organization to make safety a shared responsibility. This is also important when disseminating critical safety information across the organization, as well as automating the rollout of safety training and procedures.
In fact, the National Safety Council (NSC), the leading U.S. public service organization promoting health and safety, is clear on its support and endorsement of safety management systems for reducing the risk of workplace incidents, injuries, and fatalities. In its official policy statement on safety management systems, the NSC affirms its support for safety management systems by stating the following:
“The National Safety Council encourages all companies to adopt a safety management system, and to measure results against defined criteria, demonstrate sustained management commitment and involvement in safety, and to engage workers and employee representatives (where applicable) to participate in the process.”
Prioritizing Safety Through Technology
In its policy statement on safety management systems, the NSC defines a comprehensive safety management system as:
“a systematic explicit and comprehensive process for managing safety risks that provides for goal setting, planning and measurement of performance. Effective safety management systems are woven into the fabric of an organization, becoming part of the culture, the way that people do their jobs.”
The policy statement goes on to describe a successful safety management system as possessing attributes grouped into the following three categories:
- Leadership from Management and Employee Representatives - to ensure that all necessary resources for supporting the safety management system are available
- Technical and Operational Elements - to ensure that ongoing risk mitigation measures are in place
- Cultural and Behavioral Considerations - to maximize improvement by engaging the workforce and fostering collaborative efforts for all to contribute
Chiefly, employees should have access to all the information and resources required for preventing safety issues from occurring, as well as the tools for reporting issues in a timely manner, when they do occur. Organizations must clearly provide these resources and tools, as well as empower themselves with the proper tooling for predicting safety risk.
AI in Safety Management
To predict and mitigate safety risk, firms increasingly rely on safety solutions that harness the power of the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their employees’ safety outcomes and reduce risk in the workplace.
According to Emily Whitcomb, NSC Director of Innovation, "EHS professionals already manage large volumes of data on a daily basis, and advancements in analytics and artificial intelligence have made it easier to synthesize this information to improve existing risk mitigation activities."
AI will enable organizations to automate their safety risk mitigation efforts by helping to prevent accidents and reduce potential loss exposure, as well as future-proof their safety management efforts by introducing intelligent systems into the organization’s safety management apparatus.
Mobile & Continuous Data Access
Alongside predictive analytics and AI, mobile technologies also play a crucial role in safety management prioritization efforts, and their importance in safety management cannot be understated. With today’s distributed workforces and fast-changing compliance landscape, organizations need to pull in data wherever their employees are, contextualized to their locale and operating environment, in order to draw a more accurate, comprehensive safety risk profile. A key requirement for prioritizing safety management is therefore improving data collection with mobile devices, as well as accelerating the delivery of critical alerts, responses, and communications to employees.
To better manage safety in a changing world, firms can implement EHS software for immediate access to a formal framework for creating and implementing health and safety measures. Organizations that prioritize safety management with technology stand to see their injury rates reduced and workers’ compensation premiums lowered.
Chat with an expert to see how Ventiv’s Safety Solution can streamline your organization's safety management prioritization efforts.
