How Automated Reporting Can Improve Workplace Safety

Health and safety leaders excel at many things. Implementing policies and programs, building strong safety cultures and putting measures in place to control hazards. But when it comes to analysis and  reporting, the truth is many safety pros don’t quite measure up to their peers in other departments.

Arguably, no other business unit is under as much pressure as the EHS team. Not only are employees’ lives on the line, the company’s reputation is, too. But even though safety pros are responsible for collecting and analyzing such critical data, many still rely on outdated, manual processes to perform these tasks, like scanning inspection forms and number crunching in Excel. Yet, senior leaders in marketing, finance and IT are all generating real-time reports and using interactive dashboards to track KPIs and forecast results.

So, why are so many EHS departments lagging behind, reporting on historical metrics one sliver at a time? And more importantly, what can safety teams do to keep pace with the rest of the organization?

Embrace Automated Reports & Advanced Analytics

As safety pros, we owe it to our employees to do everything in our ability to reduce risk and prevent incidents. But, if we’re still dependent on manual, paper-based systems to protect such a critical aspect of our business, we’re leaving too much to chance.

Part of any continuous improvement process involves committing to ongoing innovation, including evolving current methods and looking for new tools to help us work smarter. This year, we’ll see a surge of leading companies adopting data visualization technology to get a deeper understanding of safety performance and begin using automation to their advantage.

3 Ways Automated EHS Reporting Helps Improve Safety Outcomes

Discover New Trends
You’ve got thousands of data points in your current EHS system, but what are you doing with them? If data isn’t being regularly analyzed to inform positive change, it’s not serving you or your workforce. Real-time automation and analysis of safety data can shed light on unknown risks and share them with the right people at the right time so improvements can be made and incidents can be prevented.

Reclaim Valuable Time
Aside from missed opportunities and data leakage problems, our manual safety management processes are incredibly time-consuming, and keep us away from what really matters: spending time in the field. By trading in your paper inspections and spreadsheets for an online, automated system, you can eliminate those hours spent analyzing data and dedicate more time to more important safety practices.

Increase Executive Engagement
To get buy-in and secure ongoing resources for your EHS program, you must speak the language of your executive team. To get leadership engaged and excited about your safety initiatives, you need to present them with easily digestible reports that enable collaborative, data-driven decision-making about the future of safety at your company.