The three challenges of modern safety professionals

Photo by Scott Blake on Unsplash

As an EHS software platform, we are always looking at how to solve a problem better. When Craig and I founded SafetyTek, we based it on the values of increasing visibility from remote sites to the office. As our mission states,

“Support workplace safety by simplifying mandatory processes, engaging in a positive safety culture, and reducing the carbon footprint using state-of-the-art technology.”

When I look back on this today, I start to think about the three statements within it — simplifying mandatory processes. Simplifying processes doesn’t inherently translate to paperless, or digital, or rip and replace your entire safety system as a whole. It’s intended to make things more accessible. This can be done with paper-based systems, too; it’s just very labor-intensive and adds a layer of administrative burden to make the information collected usable.

The second part, engaging in a positive safety culture. Safety culture is so much more than paper processes. Whether your workforce considers safety necessary comes from the top, the management team. When safety doesn’t get prioritized from the top-down, nothing an organization does will pay back dividends. Instead, safety will become an even greater cost center. Safety culture can be observed within the interaction between field staff and safety management or OSHA/OHS inspectors. It’s relatively straightforward if the sentiment between the two is positive or negative.

Reducing the carbon footprint should be in everyone’s best interest in our current state, globally. The simplest way for a technology company to help here is to remove archaic paper-based processes and transition to a cloud-based solution. It is a reduction because we shift the carbon footprint away from paper to compute power, where the power generation for replacing each piece of paper is lower.

These three points align with the current state of safety management in 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic compounds them. When we talk to safety professionals in all types of organizations about the specific problems they face day-to-day, the consensus is this:

1. Fieldworker buy-in. They struggle to motivate their workforce to complete safety documentation on time before starting work.
2. Keep up with regulatory compliance. When it comes time for an external audit of an organization’s safety program, safety professionals usually lose sleep to prepare for it.
3. Deliver value to stakeholders. Safety professionals are consistently challenged to do more with less. This tends to end with short-staffed safety departments and overworked safety people that want to do what’s right.

So how does an EHS software package make an impact on these three challenges? Let’s take a look.

1. Solving fieldworker buy-in. Moving away from manual paper-based systems can remove the administrative burden that weighs field workers down. It’s not that they don’t take safety seriously; it’s that they aren’t great administrators, and keeping track of paper burdens them to the point of negligence. Introducing technology allows you to open up a new narrative about safety, one that moves away from archaic processes, and is a signal to them that you’re listening.
2. Stay ahead of regulatory compliance. Once field-level data collection stats happening through our app, manual creation of missing or lost documents becomes a thing of the past. This means that you could pass an audit at any time. Our app gives you the ability to focus your energy on the non-compliant workers within your organization and even automate follow-ups with those that are not compliant. Human psychology shows us that workers will tend to listen to the automated reminders instead of a human as it removes the stigma of enforcement.
3. Delivering value to stakeholders. As referenced above, time focus is an asset. In normal operations with manual-based paper processes, you are so busy responding to incidents and chasing documentation that there isn’t much time for planning, measuring, and coaching workers. How can you deliver or prove that there is value in safety? We turn safety from a cost center to an investment by highlighting where your knowledge and expertise is needed.

We’ve found that once an organization implements our EHS software, you can discover precisely how safety gets performed within your workforce and create a plan to correct non-compliant behavior promptly. Use cases using collected safety data can look like the following:

1. Trend daily safety engagement
2. Increase quality control on data entered
3. Compare groups of workers performance of safety
4. Track external workers separate from employees
5. Identify and reward good behavior
6. Source control on safe work practices
7. Reduce workplace incidents
8. 6x your productivity
9. Send out updates to safe work practices or changing conditions
10. Respond to events in minutes
11. Plan upcoming training
12. Track leading indicators to create a culture of safety excellence

Imagine having the ability to plan your day/week/ month/year around safety initiatives that matter and then deliver reports highlighting these initiatives’ success or failure. Wouldn’t that be enjoyable!

As knowledge workers performing safety has been traditionally more about chasing paper than delivering actual value, our mission is to reverse that trend!