Ways safety professionals can improve productivity
The organization often strived to produce more with fewer resources. These resources can refer to time, energy, effort, cost or even manpower. Most workers have – at one time or another – felt the impact of changes made to improve productivity, usually by being asked to do more with less. But what is productivity and how does it relate to safety and health professionals?
Productivity refers to the measure of output, such as widgets, from a production process, such as labor and costs. This can be relatively straightforward when comparing the ratio of output to inputs, such as widgets produced per hour of work. With the cost of the labor hours, productivity can also measure the efficiency of a company.
Safety Professionals can improve productivity in various ways, but we will discuss the two most important ways to improve productivity in safety industries.
1. Spirit of Collaboration
A safety professional can only be in one place at one time. Therefore, it is unwise to believe that safety ownership and activities should be done by one person or one department. Safety as a management responsibility/ ownership should rest on the shoulders of those who manage and produce the work. Safety should be a resource to assist in this process, providing feedback, guidance, coaching, and expertise.
Collaboration is the key, most times it can include employee engagement in safety efforts such as conducting worksite safety observations, conducting safety training, serving on the safety committee, and participating in learning teams. For management, this can include developing safety activities such as coaching observers, conducting worksite safety observations, and developing action plans for addressing improvement opportunities for safety.
2. Technological advantage
A great deal of time is spent processing safety data as well as effort to convert that data into tangible reports for end-users such as clients, managers, or the workforce. Oftentimes paper reports are generated and the safety professional is tasked with data entry as well as report generation. Generally, the only tool available to do this processing to analyze and report is an Excel spreadsheet. We are in the 21st century, so embracing the technological wonders that are currently available will improve productivity and reduce workload.
Safety Professionals should be able to answer the following questions when it comes to technical know-how.
– Can you obtain real-time reporting from the data collected?
– Does your data collection process automatically feed into a reporting tool?
– Can reporting of information provide the ability to roll up all data within an entire global organization?
– Can you trend the information collected such as by region, area, and observer?
– Can you set your benchmark and compare your safety data, including leading indicators, with other companies?
– Can you track leadership’s engagement in the safety process?
– Can you turn observation data into actionable information?
– Can the data you collect help you predict where your next injury will occur?
If your answer to the above questions is “no”, then, the time may be right to explore a change in how you are doing things. Should safety efforts rely on building a perfect plan and expect everyone to follow it unfailingly, or should the safety effort rely on identifying barriers to adoption of the plan and proactive implementation of a solution? If the latter is your choice, then technology can be marvelous aid in identifying opportunities for improvement as well as driving and measuring continuous improvement. That is unless you enjoy living in the Stone Age.
