[National Safety Month] Improve Workplace Safety with Technology
Join the ‘Work to Zero’ movement with safety-enhancing technologies in your workplace
Often reserved for thoughts of the Industrial Revolution, the idea that death in the workplace is still a threat today seems unimaginable. The sad truth is that fatal workplace injuries are still a danger for employees worldwide. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted a decrease from 2019, in 2020 there were still 4,764 workplace casualties in the United States alone. It was staggering numbers like these that led the National Safety Council (NSC) to develop its “Work to Zero” program.
The goal of this program is to support infrastructure, business decisions, and technologies to work to zero workplace deaths by 2050. Whether you’re a technology company looking to get involved, or any business with employees, this is an exciting endeavor. Here are just a few of the ways technology is helping to support employee safety, and actions you can take in your business to improve safety measures.
Immediate Alerts with Employee Monitoring Devices
At first glance, the idea of additional monitoring for employees may sound costly and inconvenient, but this isn’t traditional monitoring. Instead of relying on additional human eyes to oversee your employees, new advancements in technology are creating ways for employees to stay safer on the job. This can include things like fatigue monitoring or wearables that can signal if an employee is overheated.
In the U.S., nearly 20% of all work-related fatalities happen on construction sites. Given the extreme conditions, heavy machinery, noise, and obstacles on any construction site, it’s a perfect industry to implement wearable monitoring systems. This can range from heart rate monitors, much like the fitness trackers many already wear, to helmets and even eyewear.
“Though the construction industry only accounts for 6% of hires in the U.S., nearly 20% of all workplace deaths happen on construction sites.”
There are even dashcams for truckers and transportation teams that can monitor if an employee is starting to doze off or take their eyes off the road. This can then signal an alert to the employee, as well as a dispatcher to check-in before accidents happen. As the leading cause of workplace deaths, preventing vehicle and transportation accidents alone can bring the number of workplace deaths down dramatically.
Safety from Surroundings with Environmental and Location Sensors
Workplace hazards aren’t limited to the actions of your employees or the equipment they’re using. Depending on your industry, even the environment itself can pose risks. This is especially true in industries like construction, excavation, utility work, and disaster cleanup. New technologies are arising to address these unique risky conditions.
Soon-to-be long gone are the days of a simple carbon monoxide detector. Instead, they’re being replaced by smarter counterparts that can be strategically placed throughout the worksite and synced together to indicate patterns of multiple gases and noxious fumes. These platforms are already being investigated, and according to an NSC survey from 2020, 47% of surveyed employers had already implemented some form of a digital gas monitor in the last year.
Gases and noxious fumes are just a few of the environmental threats, though. For more expansive work, especially for utilities, agricultural work, and heavy equipment operations, a popular technology being investigated is geofencing. Geofencing is a means of geographically tracking employee and equipment locations and alerting employees and other personnel once a targeted area has been entered or exited. While capturing GPS data isn’t new, the idea of using it for more than accountability has only been heavily researched in recent years.
Proximity monitors are another means of ensuring location and environmental safety as well. They work in a variety of ways, usually through audio or visual alarms, to alert those in a specified radius to dangers near them. These monitors can greatly reduce the risk of struck-by and caught-between injuries, which are listed as two of OSHA’s “Fatal Four” injury types.
Visibility Is for More Than Safety Vests
Safety can’t happen in a vacuum, as much as your health and safety teams would like to believe it can. It has to be a company-wide initiative and everyone needs to acknowledge their role in the process. Thankfully, technology makes it faster and easier than ever before for teams to stay connected. Use technology to keep visibility into safety concerns or risks high, and make sure everyone in your organization knows they’re accountable for supporting a safe environment.
The best communication strategies in a company are the ones that help every employee feel empowered to support company safety goals. Find ways to use technology to help your employees engage in your business’s safety initiatives. Even finding ways to help your employees feel engaged in the company as a whole can have a positive influence on safety overall.
The Society for Human Resource Management Foundation found a trend between highly engaged employees and increased safety awareness. In one company alone, engaged employees were found to be five times less likely to have a workplace safety incident.
“By strengthening employee engagement, Molson Coors Brewing Company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs during 2002…and engaged employees were five time less likely have a safety incident.”
Employee engagement can take many forms, but technology is an easy way for even the most distant teams to connect regularly. From having a secure intranet within your company to using a secured messaging system, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can facilitate fast, effective, and sometimes even fun communication patterns across all your employees.
Digital Systems Help You Communicate in Real-Time
Possibly the number one way that technology is having a positive impact on safety is by streamlining communication. This can be communication through departments, safety alerts and updates on-site, or even through data integrations that allow analysts to identify patterns sooner. With tech-backed communication solutions becoming more available every day, this means it’s a simple action you can take in your business right now to minimize your organization’s safety risks.
While the solution for different industries will vary, the options are nearly endless when it comes to looking for integrated technology solutions for your business processes. Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can mean there’s a single source of truth for all your customer information. On the other hand, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system means you can pull data and analytics from across your entire organization to see workplace incident patterns or trends. Even switching to a digital inspection form means that any worksite concern will be immediately available to all project managers.
The options for which pieces of technology your business should implement are vast, but the most important thing is making sure they all work together. Integrations and fast-moving data syncs are one of the features you’ll see across all emerging technologies in ‘Work to Zero’ plans. Getting all safety information to key stakeholders as soon as possible is one of the best ways to enhance workplace safety.
Safety Training Should Never Be on the Back Burner
Most organizations do a great job at ensuring all new employees go through an initial “training” or “onboarding” phase, but in many cases, that’s where the training stops. But, all industries would benefit from continuing their employee training and education as time goes on. Whether it’s from seasonal use for equipment, new equipment being brought into your organization, or enhanced training for employee promotions, everyone appreciates a refresher course.
The NSC’s ‘Work to Zero’ Safety Technology white paper in 2020 noted that “lack of training was earmarked as a systemic risk in every scenario” they encountered for the study. But they also cited that new augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies were more effective than classroom trainings. VR technologies allow a user to enter a completely computer-generated environment through audio and visual cues, while AR technology takes the user’s existing environment and overlays it with computer generated images and animations. These technologies are just starting to be implemented by organizations, but their potential use cases are nearly unlimited.
“VR and AR training are found to be more effective than traditional classroom training programs and help improve knowledge recall and retention.”
These reality-altering technologies allow users to fully experience potentially dangerous situations without ever being at risk. They can also provide real-time training for new equipment at a fraction of the cost and risk of using the machinery in real life. This same study cited by the NSC also found that retention of the training was higher when people had VR- or AR-supported experience, as opposed to watching video tutorials or typical classroom training materials.
Keeping training systems within a digital platform is also helpful to the rest of the organization. By utilizing a digital tracking system it’s easy for stakeholders to identify weak points in training, which trainings have been successfully completed, and where there may be trends or gaps in training among entire teams. Collected data from these platforms can then be used to complete compliance forms, insurance or worker’s comp filings, and even employee evaluations. This process can even be automated if you’ve integrated digital forms into your organization.
Safety Never Takes a Day Off
Workplace hazards are complex and ever-evolving adversaries that all businesses must face. New technologies and innovative solutions are thankfully on the rise, but the NSC created the ‘Work to Zero’ program for a reason: Safety is still a challenge. The most important thing to remember when it comes to safety in your organization is to never stop aiming for zero workplace accidents, injuries, and fatalities. The solution may not happen overnight, but safety should be a top priority for everyone in your organization every day.
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