The days of managing health and safety programs using spreadsheets or disparate systems are quickly fading, if not long gone. As companies grow their businesses and requirements for transparency surge, it is becoming increasingly critical that they also bolster their information management approach to avoid risking non-compliance, the health and safety of its employees and profitability.
Create a Strong Safety Culture to Protect People and Profits
It is no secret that workers’ compensation claims and health and safety violations can take a large chunk out of a company’s profits. According to OSHA, “nearly 4 million workers are seriously injured on the job each year.” This number translates into approximately $50 billion worth of annual claims and doesn’t even factor in penalties, which can range up to $7,000 for each serious violation and up to $70,000 for each willful or repeated violation.
Today’s progressive corporations are moving beyond attaining compliance and adopting a more holistic vision of creating a strong safety culture that not only protects its people, but also its profits. Awareness and visibility into operations must be raised to fully evaluate the impact of occupational injuries and illnesses. This enhanced, streamlined vision will not only help to identify patterns to prevent future occurrences by determining the root cause, but also serve to protect profitability.
Break Down Corporate Silos
While most organizations have a health and safety program already established, they are often managed at the business or site level. Moreover, the corporate functions of risk and health and safety are often siloed, creating inefficiencies and limiting the ability for corporations to make decisions based on the complete informational picture. They are unarmed without tools to correlate data and derive actionable insights; working across different, non-integrated systems; and are not effectively communicating with one another. In order for organizations to develop a strong health and safety culture, these functions must be connected.
In addition to functional alignment, companies can overcome this challenge by implementing an enterprise software system with the right analytics toolset to integrate data into a single platform. Unlike software systems of the past, these new technologies will not tax an organization’s most limited resources – its people and IT infrastructure. They integrate with an organization’s existing internal and external systems to deliver powerful data-driven dashboards, alerts and insights to help minimize financial risk exposure while preventing future incidents. An enterprise platform system also helps empowers companies to drill down into data to correlate factors such as employment tenure, location and age to identify patterns and move the needle on employee safety.
