The job of an EHS professional is never-ending, as you are continually challenged to stay ahead of new and evolving threats and keep safety top of mind throughout your organization. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for employees to become apathetic about safety or to feel pressured to prioritize other responsibilities.
Take, for instance, a 2017 survey by the National Safety Council that found that 58 percent of Americans working in construction felt that safety takes a backseat to productivity. In 14 other industries, that number was 36 percent. These figures illustrate how easy it is for workers to become complacent about safety. It’s up to workplace safety professionals like you to ensure that safety is part of their everyday work life—not a separate, time-consuming task that is easily forgotten.
Limits of a Typical Corporate Safety Program
Take a moment to think about how your current corporate safety program works. At many organizations, safety plans are stored in large, bulky binders, and safety protocol or tips are printed on posters or handouts. Unfortunately, when an incident occurs, employees must scramble to locate the appropriate information. If they are in the field when a problem emerges, they may not be able to access the relevant documents at all.
Now think about how employees submit incident reports. At many companies, incident reports are still completed using hard-copy forms, while others have at least digitized the paperwork and made it available on their intranet or network.
However, each of these approaches presents a common problem: Employees cannot submit the reports in real time, during the crisis itself. So not only is there a delay in the incident report, but the employee may not fully remember the details of what happened. In addition, hard-copy and digital forms do not provide a quick and easy way to include important supplemental information, such as photos or video.
Faced with these difficulties, perhaps it’s no wonder that many employees lose motivation for following proper corporate safety protocol. These types of recurring work tasks should be streamlined, user-friendly, and intuitive to encourage employees to continually prioritize safety. One of the most reliable ways to ensure that corporate safety truly becomes part of your culture is to leverage user-friendly technology in order to more deeply ingrain it into your workers’ day-to-day lives.
A Modern Approach
Today, the most effective workplace safety programs incorporate mobile technology via a digital platform. This is an effective way to operationalize your safety plans by transforming lengthy documents into digital playbooks that are role-, situation-, and location-sensitive to ensure each user has access to the most relevant information precisely when he or she needs it most.
A mobile corporate safety solution offers several important features:
- Easy access from any location. These days, the majority of your workforce likely owns at least one mobile device. By using a digital platform for workplace safety, you ensure that every user gains anytime/anywhere access to actionable safety guidelines, procedures, checklists, and even incident forms, even if he or she is working in the field or moving throughout your facility.
- Real-time notifications. A workplace safety solution enables you and your team, as well as other employees, to continuously communicate as a group. Users can send and receive alerts before, during, and after an incident to keep others updated on the status of the event and to help ensure a faster, more streamlined response.
- Instant updates. A mobile solution enables you to push plan updates out to all users—instantly. This saves time and money over making updates to hard-copy plans. And it ensures that every employee is referencing the most up-to-date information when the next incident occurs.
- Streamlined reporting functions. Real-time, in-crisis reporting through the platform allows employees to immediately notify the appropriate people of what is happening. They can also attach images and a GPS location to provide more thorough detail on safety hazards and incidents.
These features enable organizations like yours to significantly improve their response times while also optimizing compliance and your overall safety record. Over time, these benefits can help you save money and make the most of the time and resources invested in workplace safety—a goal that any corporation could benefit from.
Fostering a Culture of Safety
By leveraging the convenience of mobile technology, a digital workplace safety platform helps keep employees fully engaged in safety. A simple, streamlined interface makes it easy to report incidents and reference safety guidelines, which makes it less likely that workers will skip important steps or become apathetic about safety. As a result, safety will become more embedded in the culture of your workplace, which leads to a safer, healthier, and more prepared work environment now and over time.
