You will be surprised to see the extent health and safety technology can influence your organization’s safety culture. All of us know the influence of smartphones and social media on all aspects of our lives. Today’s emerging culture is heavily dependent on technology. The same applies to the corporate culture in your organization. If technology is not a part of how you build and reinforce your corporate culture, you are going to fall behind.
You will be surprised to see the extent health and safety technology can influence your organization’s safety culture. All of us know the influence of smartphones and social media on all aspects of our lives. Today’s emerging culture is heavily dependent on technology. The same applies to the corporate culture in your organization. If technology is not a part of how you build and reinforce your corporate culture, you are going to fall behind.
From a safety program perspective, health and safety technology is a key component of developing and creating a sustainable safety culture. Today, the market offers various tools, applications, and software to make it easier for you to:
Let’s now look at the three main areas in your health and safety (H&S) program where you can benefit substantially from technology. These include training, consistent capturing of data, and monitoring activities. Furthermore, these three areas need to be in harmony for you to maximize your benefits from your health and safety investment.
The importance of health and safety training when onboarding and orienting new employees or placing employees in a new position is crucial. Regardless of an individual’s qualifications and experience, during orientation and onboarding, new hires begin to find out how things are done in the company.
How things are done in the company is part of what creates a sustainable safety culture. These are the core values that drive your organization’s culture. Moreover, they drive the custom processes and procedures that arise for such culture. Now, when new hires come on board, they enter a culture that has already been established, with a bar that is set high. Health and safety technology makes it much easier for organizations to be consistent. Furthermore, they help you reinforce a safety culture, right from the start.
You need to get the message across to everyone in the company that it is not about one department against another, but one team, from the senior management to the frontline staff. This is where technology can be of great help for employers. Technology can help employers choose a more appropriate and effective way to convey these messages to their staff. Technology allows an employer to use customized training material with interactive and state-of-the-art visual representations to communicate key messaging to its staff.
The next step is to ensure all procedures and material pertaining to employee tasks, and the hazards associated with these tasks, are read and acknowledged. This can be done through tests and quizzes on as many, if not all, of the procedures and training material. Tracking technology then records, as well as analyzes, results. The results from such quizzes and tests provides an initial measure of comprehension level, and tells the supervisor where additional training or intervention may be necessary.
It is ideal to have all onboarding done before employees actually enter the workplace. Technology makes it possible to do so by using a consistent, fast, online process. This minimizes coordination and recordkeeping by a single individual, which in turn benefits your organization with overall efficiency and effectiveness (including cost saving.) At a glance, at any one time, a supervisor can check to see exactly who has been trained, in what areas, with what results, and when the next refresher training needs to take place. Other specific and job specific training can be done in person, with much less time.
Once onboarding is complete, managing training (mandatory, and ongoing) is probably the most significant activity undertaken by organizations today that have an effective, sustainable safety program. Accurate, easily accessible and up to date (as close to real time as possible) training records form the cornerstone of such a program. Failing to do so, it becomes a work project for a person to maintain spreadsheets, which is only as good as the person consistently updating. If the person leaves or moves on to another position, the spreadsheet cannot be kept up to date at all times.
There are countless software systems that manage training; and it is extremely important to work out what is needed in your particular case before settling on a system. All software systems have advantages and disadvantages, and all of them tend to do some things really well and others poorly. Many are built to meet one specific need, but with the ability to integrate other requirements. For example, a software system built to manage training records could be adjusted to supporting inspections. Or an accounting system, customized to manage employee records, could then be adapted into one that also manages safety. But be smart when you choose your system. Software designed for project management could be a very poor product when extended to safety.
