Accessibility is one of the key components of any workplace safety plan. If your safety documentation and tools are difficult to access or use, your employees are, at best, going to feel inconvenienced and frustrated. At worst, they might forgo referencing the safety plan altogether.
But how does a company achieve a truly accessible workplace safety plan? Years ago, it may have been enough to create the appropriate documentation and let employees know where to find it. However, today there is a much higher standard for workplace safety in order to stay in compliance, protect employees, and safeguard physical assets.
Creating an Effective Plan
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key characteristics of a truly accessible workplace safety plan:
A focus on mobility
Many organizations still use paper-based safety plans or upload their documents to an intranet portal. However, these options aren’t truly accessible, especially for employees who work in the field or travel frequently.
This is a struggle experienced by many companies, including ValsparPRO Solutions, a mobile paint store and on-site paint solutions provider. Its workplace safety plan had been digitized onto an intranet portal, but employees couldn’t access it on their mobile phones and sometimes had trouble reading the text. Oftentimes, they struggled to find an internet connection to submit an accident report, wasting valuable time and effort.
To solve these issues, many companies are moving to a mobile solution for workplace safety. For example, ValsparPRO’s new safety plan is available to all employees through their mobile phones. They simply open an app to access all the information they need, including correct ergonomic procedures, defensive driving standards, and accident reporting protocols. The app has truly become a mobile safety plan for ValsparPRO’s drivers, who can access the information they need anywhere and anytime.
Optimized compliance
When your employees have trouble accessing your safety plan, you risk falling out of compliance with local or federal safety regulations. If workers can’t readily access the information they need, they are likelier to ignore or skip important safety measures. However, a mobile app provides easy, one-touch access to all relevant documents, which makes workplace safety a seamless and simplified part of the job. Management can even track which employees have viewed updates to the plan in order to ensure that all workers are staying up to date with safety regulations.
Real-time updates and notifications
Having a truly accessible plan also means that employees always have access to the most up-to-date planning documents. ValsparPRO achieved this with a mobile solution that pushes notifications to field reps and teams when safety guidelines and standards are updated.
Previously, there was no way to track whether or not employees had read the updates that were sent to them. And if they weren’t logged into their computers at all times—impossible for employees who are frequently on the go—they could easily overlook emails and alerts from their intranet platform. Now the safety and environment supervisor can easily see who has viewed the safety updates and completed any relevant training, which enables him or her to better focus his or her follow-up and training efforts.
Improved communication and accident reporting
By leveraging mobile technology for workplace safety functions, ValsparPRO and other organizations enable instantaneous communication between employees and other team members. A mobile app also allows for real-time accident reporting without the need to fill out paper forms or search for an internet connection.
A truly accessible plan offers incident reporting through each employee’s mobile device. At ValsparPRO, this means a field rep can submit a properly formatted incident report in just a few minutes. He or she can even include images and GPS location data for further detail. This allows ValsparPRO to quickly attend to the most urgent incidents, which, again, helps improve compliance and keeps individual employees safer.
Embrace Accessibility
These days, there’s no reason for an organization like yours to still rely on paper-based safety plans and inaccessible intranet portals. You have an opportunity to leverage the potential of mobile technology to make your safety plan truly accessible, no matter when or where your workforce needs it. As a result, you’ll be able to optimize overall workplace safety, improve compliance, and increase the accuracy of workplace safety communication and reporting. This will not only benefit the organization—it will also help ensure that each and every employee can do his or her job safely and effectively.
