EHSDA Shorts: What Are Some Technological Tools to Drive Safety Reporting?

In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Trevor Bronson, Director of Portfolio Strategy, Intelex, Melanie (Holt) Adams, Founder, Embher, and Amy Roosa, Founder and CEO, The Safety Rack, discuss how technological tools can drive safety reporting. The discussion was moderated by Jay Kumar, Editor-in-Chief of EHS Daily Advisor.

This clip was taken from a webinar titled “Empowering Employees to Be Safe on the Front Lines,” which is available for free on-demand here. The webinar was sponsored by Intelex.

Transcript (edited for clarity):

Kumar: Trevor, what are some tools from the technological side to drive reporting?

Bronson: This is kind of Intelex’s bread and butter. We think about driving culture. We think about making sure people are able to bring up risks and kind of speak about/convey anything that’s happening on the frontline. A big part of that is going to be the ability to report it. So thinking about tools to drive reporting, mobile devices are going to be the best in many circumstances, although not all because not everyone is permitted to have them.

But when you think about a tool to drive reporting from the front lines, it needs to be really nonobtrusive, right? So an employee is out there to do their job. And while reporting risks are part of what they’re asked to do during their day-to-day, it’s not their core job. In reality, it’s their secondary or tertiary function.

So first thing is first, it cannot interfere with them just doing their day job. Number 2, it needs to be really easy to use in the sense that they may not use it all that much. So when they do use it, call it once a month, it can’t be, “Oh my gosh, I forgot how to create this report or submit this observation. How do I do that? Let me ping the EHS person” or actually, “You know what, this is kind of too much of a pain. I’m not going to do it at all.” You have to avoid that.

So, and thirdly, you want to make sure it really works like it gets the risk to the person that’s responsible for assessing it, for fixing it, for implementing a corrective or preventive action. So when we think about tools to drive reporting, it’s just usually giving some sort of way for that frontline worker, usually via a mobile device, to really easily go in and do something quickly, correctly every time. And then we’ll get to the third bullet here, bidirectional feedback loops in a little bit. But that’s really the key when we think about a reporting tool.

Kumar: Amy, what are your thoughts on reporting tools?

Roosa: Oh, I love them as somebody that’s been in a lot of jobs where I’ve been like the only EH and S person. You’re kind of the person that’s doing three jobs at once and you can’t be the intake person all the time. So having tools that actually drive that, being able to report things back to me, being able to sort them more efficiently to be able to say what is the priority, what is the high risk that I need to deal with or that can help a supervisor out in the field have a critical conversation in a split second versus something that probably used to be forgotten about is huge for me.

I think what I look for now is like what can be the investment in that for me? How do I sell that back up to my bosses? And I know we’ll probably get that into that conversation later, but it has aided me versus 10 years ago or even 15 years ago when I was a safety manager doing these things and I didn’t have these. It was more work.

And again, I’ll state it because anybody listening could probably agree: You do the job of three people when you’re in safety. And that’s just how it’s always been. So if I can use a tool that actually reduces my time and makes me a little bit more efficient to protect my workers, I’m going to do that.

Kumar: Melanie, what are your thoughts on reporting tools?

Adams: Yeah, I think the days of pen and paper are going away, if they’re not already, because there are powerful tools to leverage out there that really do make that easier for somebody to make. An observation really does give somebody the opportunity to communicate what’s happening on the front lines in a more direct way. But what we need to do is make sure we’re using that data in a way that’s helpful and feed that.

And I think it’s hard to not jump to that third bullet there of feedback loops, because it really is all wrapped up into that. If you have a great tool and you want to encourage people to use it, certainly they need to be able to get something out of it themselves, right? And whether that’s an observation that they made that got corrected, that’s a positive feedback loop, they can see direct correlation to that.

Maybe they’re not experiencing the same hazard as somebody else in a different plant, but it’s coming. So some of those kind of preventive, predictive-type technologies I think are super powerful and we collect so much data sometimes and don’t do a good job of doing something with that data.

So the other thing is if you want somebody to use a tool to report something, it doesn’t just go into a black hole where they don’t feel like they’ve been encouraged to report more if there’s nothing coming from it or that it just goes into a black hole. Again, I think that is important to get somebody to have an easy tool to drive that reporting and then give them the opportunity to hear back from what their reports are providing.