5 Activities To Prioritize During National Safety Month
Prioritize your employee safety: keep each other safe in the workplace
Regardless of your business type, safety is imperative in everything you do. From tracking inventory, to using ladders or forklifts, to working on a construction job site, monitoring health and safety is something every business must be aware of. The question is, what health and safety measures does your organization have in place? And most importantly, are they continuously making improvements to ensure a safer, healthier place to work?
As we observe national safety month, we’ll not only dive into best practices for enhancing safety in the workplace but also recommend digital solutions to enhance current operations.
Revisit workplace safety procedures/processes
Waiting for an accident or fatal work injury to take place should not be how you determine when to revisit workplace safety procedures and processes. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020. Although this was a 10.7% decrease from 2019 (5,333 recorded), that is still roughly 15 deaths a day or more than 100 a week.
In order to revisit safety processes, evaluate what makes sense for your business type. For example, if you are a construction company, it might make sense to revisit safety procedures after every construction project. What worked? What didn’t? What was missed? What else can we do? Whereas if you are a restaurant, it may make more sense to evaluate safety on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Facilitating this revaluation period can be streamlined with digital solutions like online forms. Transitioning business processes to a digital nature not only removes administrative burdens but also unites collected data into one place – simplifying data extraction. With capabilities to share forms electronically with everyone, these fillable pdf forms can be leveraged to determine when workplace safety procedures need to be updated.
Standardize the completion of safety processes
Incorporating digital solutions within safety processes not only helps standardize operations but also improves quality, productivity, and employee morale. Standardizing processes means people in an organization understand the steps to complete a given task or sequence of tasks based on the rules that are in place. Whether you decide to go the mobile app route or wish to introduce an online form builder into your process, standardized processes are proven to be more effective.
“If managed properly, standardized work establishes a relationship between people and their work processes. This relationship can enhance ownership and pride in the quality of work performance. The result is high morale and productivity.” - Walter McIntyre, Lean and Mean Process Improvement
Establish regular training sessions for employees
As your business evolves and grows over time, so should your safety training. Too many times businesses make the assumption that one training seminar a year is good enough for safety training when in reality, it should be at the top of the list for prioritization. In fact, Safety Works! identifies numerous instances during an employee’s journey where regular safety meetings should be in place:
New employees who are changing jobs
All employees should receive ongoing training in hazards and safety protocols as they arise
Retraining should take place when an employee has been away from work for an extended period of time, when an incident happens, new equipment or procedures are introduced
Required federal standards or industry-related protocols
Whatever “regular” means for your business, finding a way to digitize safety training not only adds to your standardized approach for structural processes but also maintains all your records in an easy-to-find location.
Increase visibility into safety processes (real-time data/documentation)
There are various methods to increase visibility into safety processes. When seeking a solution for how to accomplish this make sure your digital solution allows you to:
Integrate with your existing tech stack (native integrations or an open API) to generate a constant current of real-time data
Set up recurring safety training and updates on procedures for company-wide alignment
Create digital forms that include Image or Sketch fields, to visually explain what takes place in remote locations (i.e. job sites)
…and much more!
When you move your procedures to a digital space, and you have a centralized location to retrieve it all, you simplify and streamline visibility. Talking about processes in real-time is one thing, but having collected data live in a digital realm to continuously fall back on helps garner actionable insights.
Assess and analyze hazard, injury, and illness reports for patterns
When evaluating safety and health trends within your organization, digital tools that offer Reporting capabilities allow businesses to garner actionable insights from collected data. The National Safety Council recorded that the U.S. experienced 55.4 million nonfatal preventable injuries, meaning roughly 1 in 6 people sought out medical attention. Preventable is the keyword here!
For example, with COVID-19 coming in waves at a time, a restaurant that leverages a digital solution with Reporting functionality could observe that most illnesses are reported on Monday mornings. With that information in mind, they now have the ability to do several things, such as:
Add extra rounds of cleaning measures on the weekends to keep employees and customers safer and healthier
Include preventive measures, like employee masking, on weekends to create a safer environment
Adjust employee schedules to accommodate this trend (i.e. have employees rotate who works weekends to limit exposure)
All that information now becomes incorporated within safety and health measures! Without digital solutions in place, these trends might go unnoticed.
At the end of the day, prioritizing safety should be the beacon of your business. Capturing data in a digital environment not only implements change but standardizes approaches, enhances visibility, and increases morale. Place your employee's health and well-being first and start to experience the benefits of digitization today.
About GoFormz
GoFormz is a digital forms solution that brings together collected data into a singular location using your exact paper forms. Whether you use government-specific forms, like OSHA documents, or have your own internal word document forms you created, like contact forms, GoFormz can bring your processes to the digital realm. We believe digital transformation should be simple and easily accessible, that’s why our powerful form builder and offline capabilities allow for simple drag and drop smart fields and streamlined data collection. Even the most technologically challenged can learn how to make a fillable pdf in a matter of minutes. Complete with an open API and native integrations, you can be confident that your data is easily accessible and constantly current.
