Managing the health and safety of your organization is critically important – but it doesn’t have to be complicated. The key is to leverage a health and safety management system that can help you collect data, take action, and manage outcomes efficiently and effectively. With complex regulations, auditing requirements, and unpredictable conditions, what functionality should you look for to keep your employees and workplace safe?
Create a Culture Where Safety is a Core Value
Many organizations depend on manual collection, analysis, management, and even reporting of workplace incidents. Systems can be siloed, and actions can be disjointed and inconsistent. When this happens, health and safety can get lost in the day-to-day shuffle instead of being front and center.
A health and safety management system can unlock relevant information across the organization to help you manage incidents, requirements, and reports. An integrated health and safety management system can unite disparate data and functions for a holistic view that encourages a collaborative response.
Here are the five things to look for in an integrated health and safety management system to help you stay on top of your risks.
Safety Audit
Audits are critical to assessing safety in the workplace. Without a standardized approach to collecting the information, however, your recommendations, action plans, and compliance could be based on incomplete or erroneous data. And there could lead to serious consequences.
Today’s health and safety management systems automate and streamline the assessment process and provide a standardized way to gather and manage data. All the data you need is accurately and completely collected in one place where it can be easily analyzed and acted upon.
Regulatory Compliance
There are multitudes of ever-changing rules and regulations surrounding health and safety, all of which must be complied with to avoid often steep penalties. Running required reports from disconnected spreadsheets can be extremely labor intensive and error-prone, leaving you exposed to fines – or worse, if health and safety itself ends up being compromised.
Today’s health and safety management system uses safety data already collected to help you stay on top of recordable incidents, meet reporting timelines, and quickly build critical reports. Technology can proactively monitor new regulations so you’re never at risk of missing something important.
Incident Reporting
Incident reporting is the backbone of any health and safety management system. After all, you can only fix what you know about. Confusing forms that are hard to find can stand in the way of incidents getting reported. And the data you do collect is often incomplete or outdated.
Today’s health and safety management system expedites incident data collection with intuitive forms, simplified templates, and auto-filled fields. Users can upload pictures and documents directly to the file, so everything is in one place. Many times, users can report incidents anonymously to help overcome the fear of blame. Real-time alerts also can be set to notify those who can investigate, evaluate, and take action.
Root Cause Analysis
If you want to cure the underlying problem, you need to understand the root cause. Disparate systems make it almost impossible to connect the dots and solve the underlying issue – especially in a timely way.
Today’s health and safety management system helps you get to the bottom of an issue by seamlessly consolidating data and identifying concerning trends. You can easily collaborate across risk teams, HR, quality control, and other parts of the organization for coordinated efforts to break the cycle of reoccurring, costly incidents.
Reporting and Analytics
Data that can’t be easily visualized is difficult to comprehend. And reports that must be painstakingly produced by hand are so time consuming the data could be completely out of date by when the report is ready. You end up spending lots of valuable time on a task that produces something that is practically meaningless.
Today’s health and safety management system helps you understand the story behind the data, so you can make the best decisions. Technology uses real-time data, powerful analytics, and intuitive report-design tools to convert complex information into easy-to-understand graphics that communicate a clear picture of your safety situation. You have everything you need to articulate safety risks to the broader organization and collaborate on actions.
An integrated health and safety management system can help you put safety at the forefront by tracking all safety processes, training status, compliance requirements, hazard data, and incidents in one place. You have up-to-the-minute, accurate data, and sophisticated analytics to help you spot early-warning signs, identify trends, and monitor incidents that escalate into claims. The upshot? Healthier employees, fewer incidents, and better results. Find a system that can do that, and you’re off to the races – as safely as possible, of course.
Looking for a permanent fix to costly problems? Download A Guide to Using Root Cause Analysis to start digging deeper for better results – and check out Riskonnect’s Health & Safety solution.
