Workplace safety might not be a subject people want to talk about, however, it is one that has to be taken seriously so as to ensure the safety of every single employee at your workplace.
We’ve all heard the standard conversations about ensuring that equipment is up to date, or that there are no open hazards, however, did you know that you can use other methods such as data to help improve workplace safety?
Data is already used across the workplace for mapping trends and economics, so why not use those same tools to help improve your workplace safety. Here are a few ways in which data can be used to improve workplace safety.
Log and Notice Trends
Start to log and graph daily interactions that you see in the workplace. This collection of data can help you to anticipate accidents or track when accidents happen the most. What you decide to plot and collect data on is up to you.
You could look to collect information about the types of accidents that occur in your workplace, or you can collect data about when they happen in your workplace. Once you have collected this information, you are going to want to map these points so you can view them all at once.
There are tools out there that allow smoothly mapping data points, making it that much easier to view the information. From there you can go about making the necessary changes.
Do you find accidents are occurring at the same time every day? If so, you might want to investigate what happens at that time and see if it is due to employee fatigue, or people getting together at that time and trying to cut corners. The more information and data you have about accidents, the more likely you are to be able to confront and solve the issue.
Product Predictive Maintenance
While we would like to believe that products can last for an extended period of time, the reality of the situation is that at some point they will break down or malfunction.
If your equipment is something like a coffee machine, a crash isn’t a big deal. But imagine when you’re working with a large machine; one failure can seriously injure your employees.
By collecting data on all the products you use, you can better understand when some equipment starts to fail. With all the data collected, you can perform maintenance on these items before any problem happens.
While this won’t solve all of your issues, it can help combat major incidents before they happen.
Analyze the Root Cause
Using data to identify the underlying causes of problems is another excellent strategy to increase workplace safety. Is this accident taking place because the machinery is broken or because there isn’t enough training being provided at the job?
You can then take the necessary actions to fix them by being able to identify the root cause. Finding a remedy is impossible if you don’t understand how or why the issue is occurring.
You can get an excellent notion of where to start tackling problems by logging and evaluating all of this data.
Reach the Right Conclusion
Data allows you to be more prepared for what might happen. This gives you a huge advantage by making you able to do more preventive actions.
If you’ve taken necessary steps to use the data to help prevent future incidents, you might better understand what’s happening. In addition, you’ll get insight into required corrective issues as well.
For example, if you have done everything you can to avoid the problem in the future, but still, some issues happen, seeing your employees might be necessary. And you need to do some corrective actions.
So the data could be beneficial by taking the guesswork out of what you are doing. Also, logical conclusions could be drawn much easier.
Publishing Data Allows Employees to See
While data can definitely help you and your company, it can also greatly benefit your employees. Your employees are also better equipped to manage the risk if they can see some related data.
These include what incidents could happen in the company, how often they happen, and the damage they could cause.
Sharing this data with employees of the company is very important. That’s why some experts recommend all employees should be informed at the company. On the other hand, you could see more and more problems if you hide it from them.
You Can Easily Evaluate Your Own Procedures
The final great thing data collection does is that it allows you to easily analyze and evaluate your own current safety procedures.
Are they on par or are you lagging behind in some areas? With Data Aggregation, you will be able to easily view all this data and then make the necessary changes.
You may need to upgrade some of the equipment you have, or to upskill your staff by holding another training session. In most cases, some solution could be there to help you prevent this from happening again.
Workplace safety can be improved through analytics and data. We provided a few options above. Although many people do not want to spend money on it, they should realize that workplace safety may have a huge impact on the future and culture of their organization.
This is also critical for employees. This is because if their workplace becomes hazardous, they may leave or, if they stay, the quality and performance of their job would suffer.
Therefore spending time and money might benefit a large number of employees in the firm. This is something you might recognize better in the future.
