Page 95 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

EHS SOFTWARE
Can Technology Help to Build a Culture of Safety?
EHS analytics provides greater insight into what happened and why, allowing greater confidence in predicting and managing future performance.
BY PETER WALSH
www.ohsonline.com
JUNE 2019 | Occupational Health & Safety 91
Every safety officer knows that no system, training, or tool can help workers to keep safe unless they are personally committed to this goal themselves.
When workers are pressured by many and at times conflicting priorities, companies are striving to help the workforce internalize safety as a value and as a way of working. Programs focused on leadership, teamwork, wellness, and psychology are rolled out to achieve workforce buy-in for safety programs.
How Does Technology Help
Build a Safety Culture?
Technology is sometimes mistakenly seen as a bar- rier, or an alternative to safety culture programs. It is
also sometimes seen as a tool for corporate control, which would undermine personal responsibility, or as an alternative to a focus on desirable behavior. In fact, technology is a great force multiplier and can help drive strong engagement in behavioral safety programs. Here’s how:
Worker-Centric Safety Technology
What is worker-centric safety technology? This ap- proach allows EHS to move out of the office and on to the shop floor or site, where it can be most effective. It takes the tremendous organizational expertise, ex- perience, and know-how embodied within EHS soft- ware systems, and places it in the hands of the work- ers, providing a channel for institutional knowledge to be effectively used.
We achieve this by providing a range of tools and technology so workers get the information they need, when and where they need it. Below are examples of worker-centric safety technologies that help our end user establish a culture of safety excellence.
Enterprise Wide Cloud
Cloud-based solutions allow information to flow freely, crossing functional and organizational bound- aries and delivering the greatest value from the invest- ment embedded in a database. Information can be made available to people and devices any time, any- where, ensuring the workforce always has access to the information needed for the task at hand. Informa- tion becomes real time and localized, and everyone is working from a single, consistent version of the truth.
Integrated Suite
While software is often considered and used in terms of functional silos (e.g., Incident Reporting, Document Management, Action Management), the real world does not operate in such a disjointed man- ner. A typical EHS task will usually involve a combina- tion of observation, referral to reference documents, data capture, collaboration, analysis, and reporting. An integrated platform is essential to ensure preferred processes can be implemented without friction, con- fusion, and frustration caused by switching between devices, packages, interfaces, etc.
Only when the EHS platform is integrated across the functions and offers the user an intuitive and con- sistent experience will it become an aid in the devel- opment of safety culture rather than a burden.
Mobile
Mobile capability ensures personnel can take their EHS resources with them, wherever they go. Whether
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