Page 14 - OHS, October 2020

FACILITY SAFETY
EHS Compliance: Make It Personal
It is imperative that your health and safety programs meet your workers where they’re at.
BY KRAIG HABERER
Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) work doesn’t always happen in the office; in most cases it happens in the field. So, how are EHS professionals keeping up with their dual
obligations to keep workers safe on the job and their company in compliance?
As health and safety professionals, you have vast health and safety programs that may span multiple divisions, locations and work functions across hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. To deploy the most effective health and safety program, tailoring the requirements to the situation and needs of each employee enables you to shrink the global requirements to each worker in a “just in time” and “just as needed” scenario.
As the title suggests, making safety personal means two things: First, putting relevant and personalized data, content and safety solutions directly in the hands
of your field personnel, but also taking advantage of technology solutions to operate better in the field with better feedback, better functions, and better action.
The real moments of incident prevention and response happen with workers themselves, wherever that work might take place. Safety professionals are the bridge between those worlds—corporate safety/compliance programs and the frontline work. Therefore, it’s imperative that your health and safety programs meet your workers where they’re at. In this article, I’ll talk about the opportunities and benefits of cascading safety initiatives down to each employee and how to make health and safety personal for each employee based on their unique locations, functions and needs.
Personalized Safety: What’s in It for Me?
Personalized health and safety programs benefit employees, managers and businesses as a whole. At the employee level, they help workers organize their day and save valuable administrative time. Utilizing mobile-friendly safety management software allows employees to stay in the field where they can be most productive. Imagine an employee safety dashboard that organizes each worker’s activities, training requirements, safety documents and location- specific or role-specific job hazards. Furthermore, personalized health and safety programs specific to workers and roles allow for faster onboarding when specific training resources and relevant job information are right at their fingertips.
For safety managers, personalized programs create a proactive health and safety culture. With collaborative tools and content in the field, managers can push information to the field in advance and respond quicker when there is an issue. It enables managers to capture feedback immediately and maintain a hand on the pulse of your organization. Additionally, incident tracking, hazard management, observations and corrective actions are all contextualized down to the individual worker, thus enabling teams to pinpoint specific areas to address.
Finally, corporations and executives benefit because health and safety technology in the field delivers leading indicators via data-gathering mechanisms that give businesses early insights into what is happening in the field. These leading indicators help identify potential issues before they become an issue, raise the profile of safety and boosts employee engagement.
So, what are the best areas to make safety and EHS
14 Occupational Health & Safety | OCTOBER 2020
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