The impacts of a serious incident can create chaos, wreak havoc on your workers, and your company’s reputation. A serious incident or fatality could lead to:
- Employee injury
- Hefty legal fees
- Worker compensation claims
- Regulator penalties
- Delays in jobs
Not only do these ramifications seriously affect the well-being of your workforce, but could impact your overall safety ratings and jeopardize future business.
Leading companies understand that their most valuable assets are their people and the nature of the safety department at the core is protecting the lives of the workforce, and the reputation of the organization.
Making the decision to improve your overall HSE and compliance efforts is the next step towards enhancing your organization’s safety scorecard. With the right tools, your company will be on their way to significantly improving their impact on worker safety, compliance ratings with HSE regulators, and reputation.
Watch out for the warning signs of a poor safety culture growing within your organization. Here are few to look out for:
- Workers ignoring safety procedures
- No time allocated for safety meetings to discuss hazards
- Workers operating equipment without proper training/certification
- Incidents not being reported
Such safety warnings should not be taken lightly as they could lead to a serious workplace incident. If you’re still not convinced that an improvement in your HSE and compliance management is needed to minimize these risks, see our post on “Be More Efficient with Safety Certifications” to better understand how to identify gaps within your current Safety Management System (SMS).
See how your business can reduce risks, prevent incidents from occurring, and make better overall recommendations on eliminating hazards from your workplace.
Let’s review the top 5 benefits of switching to HSE and compliance software:
Benefit #1: Implementing corrective actions
Albert Einstein once said the definition of insanity is:
“doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results“.
The same rule applies to mitigating incidents from your workplace; the only way of correcting the deficiency is by identifying the root of the problem, and eliminating it to stop the re-occurrence. Regulators can easily determine why your company has recurring incidents, and you could be facing administrative penalties if the actions are not corrected.
In order to prevent an incident from recurring, corrective actions need to be documented and shared with the right people to effectively begin the change process. HSE and compliance software enables you to organize your investigative data, assign specific tasks to individuals, and monitor who is accountable for eliminating the gaps from your SMS.
Benefit #2: Eliminate manual tasks and create transparency
Managing your entire safety management system is a difficult process to execute manually, especially when your company is experiencing a high rate of growth. Communication during your busy times is crucial but can often become lost between the field and office, leaving your business vulnerable to threats of non-compliance.
Spending less time on administration and more time on safer operating procedures will allow you address your deficiencies quickly, which will eliminate more risks from your business. Elevate the frustration of managing all that data and engage your workforce by providing them with easier tools to use while increasing their visibility. Help your workers embrace HSE objectives on their own by allowing them access to view their own dashboards and receive notifications when training or compliance requirements need their attention.
Benefit #3: Tracking job-site safety
An non-certified worker operating a piece of heavy machinery can be a contributing factor in a major workplace incident. How do you verify your workplace competencies to ensure unqualified or untrained workers don’t make it to the job-site?
It’s challenging to manage your entire workforce while monitoring their certification expiration, validating their tickets, and maintaining safety training. By using a software solution to track worker competency, your company can stay ahead of the game by centralizing the administration of third party training which is required by each employee, based on their role.
Benefit #4: Bridge the communication gap
HSE and compliance software enables you to showcase your most vulnerable areas and methodically approach major corrective actions to get the buy-in needed to facilitate change. Emphasizing this to an executive team can be challenging without evidence to back up your requests as they may not be directly involved in HSE and compliance efforts.
Having the transparency and real-time visibility in your safety and compliance will empower you to make well-informed and effective decisions to ignite change. Be proactive, not reactive!
Benefit #5: Improve your safety culture
Your safety culture is the “way you do things around here” and is a belief system instilled in your members on their approach to safety in the workplace. A company’s safety culture inherently requires the ability to facilitate change where deficiencies are uncovered in a self-organizing manner.
Evolving your safety culture is an ongoing process and requires commitment throughout all levels of your company. Implementing an HSE and compliance software won’t create a safety culture for you, but it will allow you to improve your overall safety ratings, decrease your number of incidents, and improve your worker churn rate. Improving your health and safety culture involves clearly demonstrating that the organization places a high priority on continuous improvements within your HSE and compliance efforts.
Summary
Making changes to how you handle HSE and compliance data stems from a progressive approach to safety management. It comes down to:
- Protecting your workers
- Due diligence
- Building the right safety culture
- Communicating your safety brand to your customers
Gathering your most sensitive data into a centralized system can give you total transparency and allow you to identify the gaps which need to be addressed within your SMS.
Turn your data into actionable items and create a safety culture that organically grows to make positive changes. With a few simple steps, you could be on your way to setting yourself apart from the competition and becoming an industry leader in safety management.
At Aimsio, our mission is to provide our clients with the tools to become those industry leaders. Our Safety and Compliance module is the latest addition in our diversified product offering, making it easy to streamline your approach to safety management. Find out how we could improve safety and compliance for your business!
