Most people are familiar with the basic regulatory requirements facilities must meet under their respective reporting regimes. Many of these requirements involve documenting incidents AFTER they occur and then performing risk or root cause analysis to drive potential change in the workplace. There is no doubt these are important steps in creating a safer workplace culture, but what if you could have a safer workplace before waiting for something bad to happen?
This is where the concept of a behavior-based safety program comes into play. Programs like these are setup so that you can identify unsafe conditions and behaviors and perform risk analysis operations on them; thereby eliminating potential accidents before they ever occur.
What would this look like in practice?
Having a daily observation program in place to monitor workers during the day for five minutes can have a huge impact. A simple observational program can be easily formed and effortlessly repeatable. Those small observational data points can then be combined to provide trends to safety managers to see if there are changes necessary to the safety program.
In this instance, employees are provided with a checklist of things to do to operate efficiently and safely in their environment. This can be anything from lockout/tagout procedures, work procedures and/or training manuals for specific equipment operation. Having clear-cut directions simplifies tasks and makes them much safer.
Establishing identifiable safety goals to work towards can also make your workplace safer. Everyone is familiar with the typical “days without incident goal”, but there are many other achievable victories to be had. Reducing the number of days with PPE infractions is an example. Combining goals with small incentives will eventually save money by helping to reduce incident costs, lower insurance costs, and prevent the loss of productivity.
This may seem like a lot of work to prevent something that may not even happen, but I promise it is worth the time and effort to set up a system to automate these tasks. To help, Cornerstone has built systems that manage these elements and can provide templates and startups to get a new, more proactive safety management system off the ground quickly and easily.
Not only does Cornerstone have the applications to easily manage all this data, but we have the expertise and knowledge behind all our systems to provide insights, offer advice and guide our users in the right direction. All of this combined has saved our customers time, money, and lives. That’s the ultimate end goal of any safety system: to provide a productive work environment for employees and see them all go home at the end of each shift safely. We are proud to provide our clients with the tools and knowledge to help make that happen.
Joshua Sampia is the Director of Product Development. He is responsible for the applications development team at Cornerstone, ranging from web-based and mobile applications to device management for safety and environmental compliance and applicability.