A couple of years ago, as I was preparing to address a conference of safety professionals in New Brunswick, I decided to look at the ideas and trends changing the way safety professionals are doing their jobs and will do their jobs in the future. To prepare for the presentation, I found it helpful to look not at the safety profession per se, but to the world outside safety and the forces that affect our society.

Is Safety Keeping Up With Technology?

As with every other aspect of society, the safety profession will be dramatically affected by the introduction and intelligent use of information technology tools. It's no secret that safety can be a hard sell, even at the best of times. That's partly because safety efforts traditionally tend to be labor-intensive, time consuming and mostly paper-based. Safety efforts also tend to generate and/or sustain large bureaucracies and administrative systems.

The use of strategic information technology tools should change all of this, and change it dramatically. The phrase "work smarter, not harder" may pose some difficulty for those who continue to use the same health and safety management techniques that they did 10 years ago.

So, at the New Brunswick conference, I posed the following question to participants: "Has your job, or your company changed in the past two years?" Almost all of them answered yes.

I then probed a little deeper and asked about the sorts of safety tools and techniques people were using to manage their accident prevention strategy. Do you know what I found? These same participants who said their world was changing have been using the same basic ideas and techniques that first became popular 20 years ago!

There's an old saying: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." Nothing demonstrates the truth of this statement for me more than the way people in health and safety are apparently using information technology.

High Tech Smart Or Low Tech Slow?

Just a few examples of an application in which technology can help make your safety management system more effective: Accident investigations, safety meetings, inspections. These are all data-heavy activities that involve a tremendous amount of work. If you're not utilizing information technology to enhance the effective analysis of all this information, you're working harder, not smarter.

For example, in a large organization of 2,000 people, just consider for a moment how many investigations, safety meetings and inspections take place in a year. What do people in such companies do with all the information these activities generate? What does the information tell them and how do they use it to determine if risks are being reduced, if the safety strategy is effective and whether they're improving safety performance?

Making it Easier and Faster - An Example

Let's drill down even further. Take a task as simple as a safety inspection.

The Old Way: Company A does five inspections per week. A safety director goes out into the field, takes a clipboard and checklist, does the inspection and comes back to the office. She then writes a memo to report the inspection findings and sends it to several individuals. Next, corrective action needs to be taken. Two weeks later, the director calls everyone who got a copy of the memo and asks if corrective action was taken. Two don't know, and one can't remember. So the director writes another memo, or does the inspection again, and finds 35% of the corrective action hasn't been completed. Back to the memo again.

The Modern Way: Company B has designed its inspection checklists on a Palm or CE computer. The safety director goes out into the field, conducts his inspection on the hand held computer, returns to the office and syncs the hand held to the PC. The PC imports the inspection to a text format, automatically generates a follow up list with priority status on select items and tracks the follow up until completion. Doing the operation this way instead of on paper saves Company B thousands of dollars in administrative costs and hours of effort.

Conclusion - Consider the IT Opportunities

At the end of the day, if I were the president of your company and you came to me with new and innovative ideas on how to transform our safety management strategy from a stodgy, paper-based bureaucracy to an electronic system that increases efficiency and productivity in the process, I'm going to want to talk to you. Now you're not only speaking safety and compliance, you're talking about improving our business. Isn't that what we've been trying to show that safety is all about?

$AFETY & THE BOTTOM LINE

The Costs of Obesity

Approximately how much does obesity cost American companies each year?

A. $875 million
B. $5 billion
C. $13 billion
D. $25 billion

Answer: C.

$8 billion of that amount goes toward health insurance-related costs; paid sick leave accounts for $2.4 billion; life insurance, $1.8 billion; and disability insurance, $1 billion.

Source: Institute on the Costs and Health Effects of Obesity Fact Sheet.

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