How to collect health and safety data from remote workers and on-site teams

Now, more than ever, it's important to capture regular and accurate health and safety data from your workforce. 

Whether your focus is COVID-19 symptom detection or incident response, wellbeing management or near-miss risk mitigation, your workforce must be the eyes and ears of your health and safety team.

How? 

Your health and safety team need to support the wider organisation by providing systems and processes for quick, simple data reporting by all employees, wherever they are.

But many health and safety teams struggle to get the visibility they need - using emails, paper forms, spreadsheets or outdated legacy systems usually means health and safety risks either aren't ever formally raised or have information missing. 

That means suboptimal corrective and preventative action management - and continued exposure to future issues.

Here's how one of our customers solved this problem. 

 

SMS case study

 

SMS are a leading UK energy and smart metering provider. With over a thousand employees across five sites, SMS has a mixture of office staff and remote customer-facing engineers. 

 

The challenge

 

Disparate pockets of information and cumbersome manual reporting blocked SMS management from seeing the full health and safety landscape of the business. 

The SMS health, safety and environmental team needed a new system to:

• Enhance and promote their culture of health and safety 
• Collect risk and opportunity data from a range of sources
• Assist their migration from OHSAS 18001 to ISO 45001

They asked themselves: what’s the best way to collect health and safety data from our remote and office teams, then use it to improve our processes?

 

 

 

EQMS by Qualsys was selected to provide a clean, simple, centralised system for the reporting and application of health and safety data.

SMS engineers can now flag risks and issues on the road by accessing Issue Manager on their mobile devices.

SMS office staff can utilise a Kiosk platform to log risk and opportunity data from the office floor in approximately 10 seconds.

And by drawing on these sources of data in tandem, the SMS management team have unlocked full visibility of the health and safety environment for coordinated follow-up action.

 

Everyone uses EQMS to report near-misses, observations, incidents throughout the business. We obviously hope we don't have those issues, but it's really important to have a full picture of what's happening in our business so we can improve it. 

                                                                     - Melissa Cannon, EQMS Project Manager, SMS

 

Overcoming hurdles

 

Qualsys Compliance Director Kate Armitage presents on

health and safety management at the

Qualsys ISO 45001 event, September 2019

 

Three primary hurdles must be overcome for good HSE data collection:

 

1) Staff feeling they don't have time to report

2) Staff feeling it isn't their responsibility

3) Staff not knowing who to report to

 

The SMS team overcame all three by giving all staff the responsibility and capability to push health and safety data directly into the EQMS system in a matter of seconds.

Staff aren't encumbered by long, distracting reporting procedures, and simple pictorial Kiosk dashboards keep the logging process quick, intuitive and automatic without pulling employees from their day-to-day roles.

 

 

 

The quality and health and safety teams can now interrogate all reported issues from a single source, follow up and resolve issues with dedicated CAPA workflows, and generate reports at the click of a button.

 

Our people can come to work knowing that any small thing they have concerns about can be raised immediately, and resolved quickly. It makes it a safer place to work all around, and a safe workforce is a happy workforce.

                                                                                      Lukan Gaskin - Technical Engineer, SMS

 

5 top tips for collecting health and safety data from your staff

• Move away from email - cluttered inboxes are difficult to organise and act on
• Provide as many reporting routes into your business management system as possible, on as many device formats as you can
• Make reporting as quick and simple as possible to maximise engagement from employees
• Encourage reporting on the 'little things' to prevent them becoming more critical
• Get some internal champions to make the process natural and accepted in the opening weeks

 

Download case study booklet

 

 

 

Learn more

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