It is important for an organization to concentrate and improve safety performance. A firm or the organization must have an impressive safety culture. Safety culture is the basic organizational circumstances, in which the important decisions are made either to enhance the safety performance or to determine the safety performance of the organization. According to the US National Safety Council (NSC), the two common factors needed for the effective safety culture in the organization are employee engagement and leadership. Apart from the leadership, it is important to analyze whether the organization has top-down safety leadership. They have to think how they can improve their employee engagement. Using the technology in the smarter way will help the organizations achieve safety culture and the employee engagement. EHS software will play a vital role in this.
Business benefits of mobile solutions
Over the past several years, one of the biggest Information Technology trends in the business world is enterprise mobility. It is the process of mobilizing business applications and processes so that employees can take the business actions anytime, anywhere. Enterprise mobility also promises the organizations to improve efficiency and productivity of the organization. It empowers and engages employees in different ways.
The growth of the mobile business applications creates greater opportunity for the EHS business leaders to improve their employee engagement and it equals the safety culture equation.
How mobile apps help in employee engagement
When employees concentrate on safety, they participate in all the actions in a meaningful way and they take responsibility for their personal safety as well as they share the responsibility with others. They will participate in all the safety activities. Safety is not just a program that is done to them; instead it is the result of their responsibility.
Most of the mobile apps help in active participation at all the organizational levels. And they help to build an outstanding safety culture. It provides the following.
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Ready to access the information when needed
With the help of the mobile apps, employees can have the real-time access to the information when needed. They provide the practical experience in job safety, safe work procedures, hazard communication info, etc. this will help the workers to take more direct ownership of taking care of risks and controlling them at the workplace. At the management level, the reports will have the better progress and it will have faster and effective decision making to improve the safety of the organization.
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Comfort in capturing safety-relevant data
Mobile apps will help the users to capture and enter important information easily and quickly, even when they are out of work or they are in a shop or somewhere, the opposite zone of the workplace. They can report the missing things and accidents instantly instead of waiting until a workstation is available. Workplace hazards can be solved quickly and corrective actions can be taken instantly. Employees can check, whether the safety management system is working as planned or designed. These are the factors that will help in the continuous improvement.
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Cross-functional collaboration
Mobile safety apps will aid in better teamwork and they will faster communication and business operations. For example, the team can conduct the EHS audit of a plant and they can share the findings in real-time. Teammates can quickly communicate among themselves during the audit and also with the plant audit management. Collaboration is further enhanced by automatic workflow and also by the push notifications. The correlative actions can be assigned quickly and the issues can be resolved instantly.
It is always best to analyze what the organization is doing to help protect the safety and health of the employees. It is not just the matter of protecting the employees from the injuries. The cost of the workplace injuries are becoming higher and it may result in low productivity.
There is a software available, organization and the employees can load them on the mobile devices and it will help the users in the health and safety functions. Some of the occupational health and safety apps are free and they are available both on iOS and Android. The apps provide good overviews, recent safety news, training videos and other aspects. There is an environment monitor for the Android devices, which measure the noise levels of the environment. There is an iOS ChemAlert App, which will answer almost all the chemical safety questions.
The query of compliance
Along with the measures to keep the organization safe there is a matter of compliance associated with it. All the small and the large size business should keep in mind that they should go by the regulations that will govern their respective industry. There are federal regulations that are imposed by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and also by the state regulations.
The first question the organizations should answer is whether they are governed by the general federal OSHA regulations or they have specific OSHA approved state regulations. The U.S department of Labor will help the organizations to know the overview state plans. If the business is regulated by the state plan, then they should reach that particular agency’s website for more information.
If the state comes under the OSHA regulations, the next step is to find, how the business is classified and then it will start finding the regulations that will cover the organization’s facilities and the type of jobs performed in the business.
The department of labor has a website called “Quick Start” that will help the specific industry to understand their own compliance obligations.
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Quick-start guides don’t offer a comprehensive assessment. They will get exactly what they claim to be. For more details regarding this, OSHA has a small business handbook, which is written to help the small business employers to meet their legal business requirements, which are imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.
Workplace safety
Many companies have taken steps for the developing safety procedures for the office walls, including the safety plans, which make use of safety apps on the employee’s smartphones. The areas where safety apps fall short are as follows.
- Accessibility
Users will have their smartphones all the times with them, but still they have to do some digging to access it. Users have to search through the menu if they want to access any particular app; same is the case for the safety apps. There will be many options available; it will take some time to select the right one.
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Reliability
Many mobile apps will ask the user to select a friend or a well-wisher to contact in case of any emergency. If this is the case, the user will run into the issue of availability. The person may or may not available when the user needs them. Some of the safety apps will not guarantee the emergency training.
There will be some of the issues associated with the safety apps, not only in the safety apps almost in all the apps. So it is better to focus on the useful features of the apps to enjoy their full functionality.
In general, mobile apps offer the great opportunity to improve the organization’s productivity, employee engagement and safety performances in their operations. With the help of these apps, the risk management can be done anywhere, in the office, out in the plant, on the plant floor or even in the offline mode if needed.
