With drastic improvements in U.S. working conditions over the last century, employees in most professions—from auto assembly to software engineering—trust that their working environments will not have detrimental effects on their health. Whether it be a poorly ventilated factory floor or dimly lit office space, occupational health experts, safety professionals, scientists from a myriad of disciplines, as well as legislators have made these conditions a thing of the past.
Looking forward, firms are increasingly looking for strategic methods to turn the risk management knobs on safety risk, treating it like any enterprise risk discipline that, with the right data and tools, can be understood and mitigated. Furthermore, challenges related to staff shortages also require a shift to digital solutions and intelligent platforms to guide the proper safety management approaches.
In this article, we’ll explore the requirements for transforming your organization's safety management efforts, and explore how a safety solution can help position you for success in this regard.
Safety Management Challenges
When it comes to public health and safety, especially in the workplace, “doing more with less” directly impacts the organization’s ability to maintain a strong risk posture. This is true across all industries, from healthcare to transportation, and is certainly the case for safety professionals; leading occupational safety and health magazine EHS Today recently interviewed 1,100 safety professionals, asking them what their biggest workplace challenges were. Their responses were resoundingly staff shortage-related.
With staff shortages, employers must remain competitive while dealing with shrinking or increasingly remote team members. As a result, safety leaders continuously need to train new team members, while at the same time reinforcing a consistent safety message and culture for the existing workforce. Efforts to establish and maintain an optimal safety culture in the organization can easily become stifled in the midst of high turnover.
Technology Needs
Technology plays a critical role in today's and tomorrow’s safety management practices, helping to improve workplace safety with diminished resources and reduced headcount. These solutions provide the organization with the following public health risk mitigation and safety management benefits:
Continuously Updated View on Incidents
Organizations require comprehensive, continuous access to incident management data in order to maintain situational awareness, mitigate risks, and remain in compliance. An environmental, health, and safety (EHS) solution allows team members to report incidents directly from the field with mobile devices and intuitive user surveys, as well as collect complete, accurate data for investigations, near misses, and exposure management.
Deeper, Wider Investigations & Analysis
When accidents or incidents occur, safety professionals require comprehensive access to the proper contextualized data in order to streamline investigations and hasten root cause analysis. An EHS software platform can help document this process, as well as monitor and streamline the investigation of injuries, property damage, and environmental incidents.
Post-incident, a digital solution makes it easier to create and track the completion of corrective actions and recommendations related to incidents, investigations, audits, and safety meetings.
Improved Visibility for Creating Better Preventative Measures
According to OSHA, following inspections of worksites, lack of communication of hazardous material is the second most frequently most cited standard last year. Organizations looking to avoid being cited for this common violation must disseminate information about workplace hazards, in a manner understandable to workers, in compliance with the OSHA Hazard Communication Standard (HCS).
An EHS solution helps centralize this information for all workers and team members, helping organizations stay compliant and avoid violations; additionally, information is continuously up-to-date through more accurate audits and inspection (e.g., in the field with mobile devices), providing and greater data visibility insights to reduce future incidents.
Focusing on Data To Reduce Risk & Improving Safety
By implementing an EHS platform, organizations take a data-centric approach to reducing risk and improving safety. For example, firms can improve survey program management with a central repository of survey results, including recommendations and temporary impairments, and make definitive links between loss experiences and preventive actions like property surveys, audits, safety meetings, and training sessions, to name a few.
An EHS solution focuses on data to help improve risk engineering and loss control efforts, scale loss management efforts more effectively, and establish a more proactive risk culture across the organization.
Knowing & Managing What’s At Stake
In order to protect what you have, you must first know what you have (i.e., what’s at stake). This requires continuous visibility and situational awareness—crucial elements for an optimal asset management strategy designed to mitigate risk exposures. An EHS software solution can satisfy these requirements by maintaining a detailed register of all exposures and assets, including properties, with their location, usage, and values, as well as crucial construction, occupancy, protection, and exposure (COPE) information. The solution may also allow for the storing of photos, building plans, engineering reports, flood maps, and other relevant documentation with each property record.
In short, an EHS solution can help transform your approach to safety management by enabling the management of workplace/occupational safety risk as any other enterprise risk—one that can be monitored, mitigated, and predicted. With risk data centralized in a single source of truth, your firm will better understand its global risk profile, reduce its safety risk exposure, and be better positioned to deliver comprehensive data to underwriters for a more favorable negotiating position.
Chat with an expert today and learn how Ventiv’s Safety Solution can help your organization transform its approach to safety management.
