(Newswire.net — October 24, 2018) — Your duty as an employer is to provide a safe working environment for employees both in-house and in the field. You must pay careful attention to worker welfare, taking all reasonable precautions to prevent injuries or accidents under particular circumstances in the workplace. This is known as health and safety due diligence.
Due diligence is a legal requirement that works to the benefit of every individual within an organization. Keeping a system in place to ensure due diligence reduces the risk of injury and illness to workers. In the event of an accident, proving such precautions were taken can protect you from liability.
And not keeping on top of it can be costly. Between 2016 and 2017, 19 fines of £1 million or higher were issued in the UK for failure to control serious risks and hazards, with the top 20 fines costing businesses a total of £38.6 million.
Keeping a health and safety diary and carrying out regular safety inspections are the best and easiest ways to demonstrate due diligence. A record should log specific issues and corrective actions taken, which can help show compliance. Even though filling up a safety diary can be tedious, gaps in accountability will appear negligent– especially if it’s not kept up to date.
When you perform inspections, note them and include any findings in your log. Health and safety experts recommend that these sorts of inspections be carried out as least once a week:
- General inspections of the workplace
- Sampling of processes, activities, and areas
- General inspections of dangerous processes, activities, and areas
- Incident inspections following an accident causing injury, fatality, or a near-miss
Regular inspections should be followed by safety audits performed every three months, and full annual audits must take place to review safety as a whole. Since completing a diary often involves filling out the same data over and over again, the process can become monotonous. That’s where automation can take over.
Maintaining compliance with health and safety automation
There’s no room for cutting corners in health and safety due diligence. Doing so would put employees at risk and organizations at the full mercy of the law. Companies must maintain compliance, but that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult.
Safety inspection software helps companies move away from traditional paper-based health and safety diaries to slick mobile interfaces where processes can be automated. The whole idea behind health and safety automation is to make performing due diligence easier, to save time, and reduce headaches.
By creating workflows, tasks can be assigned to the correct personnel and repetitive tasks automated. For example, data fields can be streamlined with the creation of prefilled forms, and new tasks scheduled based on specific responses. Those are not the only benefits, though.
Here are seven more ways inspection automation can grease the wheels of safety workflow:
#1: Predefined processes
Task assignment ensures everyone follows the same inspection and audit process. Inspections in the field often carried out by different health and safety personnel. One shared process prevents data inconsistencies and provides one version of the truth
#2: Reduced risk of noncompliance
Automated workflows allow managers to oversee operations and create individual checklists for inspections. Approvals, comments, and changes are all documented and can be made subject to review so that nothing is signed off without supervisor approval. This keeps data organized and compliant with company and regulatory standards.
#3: Avoid duplicate data entry
Safety inspection software can automate repetitive tasks. For instance, when the same data needs to be entered with each inspection, the fields can be pre-filled. Data entered automatically while completing daily or weekly processes avoids duplication, eliminates confusion, and saves time.
#4: Identify key dates
Digitally tracking compliance prevents missed deadlines by sending alerts and warnings to be when important dates are near. Where daily checks are necessary, this functionality is essential in ensuring safety records are maintained.
#5: Dynamically assign tasks
Task automation allows department leads to assign safety personnel new tasks based on their specialty. From a central interface, management provides field inspectors with the necessary documentation to complete tasks and safety inspection checklists. Individuals can log in to their account via a mobile app at any time and from anywhere in the world to view and check off jobs.
#6: Real-time access to information
Safety inspection software erases piles of paperwork, eliminating the need to send task completion updates by email or fax. This means that data can be viewed in realtime to hasten the decision making process. If inspectors identify a health and safety risk factor, supervisors can quickly arrange corrective and preventive action. This keeps downtime at bay and employees safe.
#7: Simple reporting
Historical data remains in one place, and overseers can easily examine reports for quarterly and annual safety audits. Data visualization makes information easier to analyze and explain in presentations.
Every business should keep a health and safety diary, but using pen and paper to do it is just begging for complications. Workflow automation simplifies inspections and makes it easy to record your data for a safer, smarter workplace.