Safe + Sound Week: 10 Ways to Get your Program Started

As part of OSHA’s Safe + Sound Week, the agency has a number of resources available for download.

If you are not quite ready to implement a complete safety and health program, you can download a one-pager outlining these simple steps the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) suggests you take to get started. Once these steps are completed, your organization will have a solid base from which to take on some of the more structured actions you may want to include in your program.

  1. Establish safety & health as a core value – Tell your workers that making sure they finish the day and go home safely is the way you do business. Assure them that you will work with them to find and fix any hazards that could injure them or make them sick.
  2. Lead by example – Practice safe behaviors yourself and make safety part
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Don’t Let Your Incident Management System Sink Like the Titanic

Ask a group of people what caused the Titanic to sink and most will say, “An iceberg.” In reality, the Titanic tragedy was caused by a series of events—management failures, poor-quality construction, employee errors/lack of training, poor planning, and either failure to track incidents or the inability to analyze incident data in a meaningful way—that ended with the sinking of the ship.  

As explained in the new Insight Report, The Five Things You Need to Know about Incident Reporting and Management,” safety and environmental disasters rarely occur because of a single event or incident, which is why it’s critical to adopt an incident management system that identifies root causes and protects your business from future occurrences.  

Workplace incidents can be painful for injured employees, the environment, and your organization’s bottom line, but incident management and reporting doesn’t have to be a pain point for you. 

Effective incident reporting and risk management … Read more...

Stress-Free Safety and Incident Reporting

Fulfilling standard compliance and safety incident reporting requirements can be stressful and tedious for anyone, but using generic technology can make the process even worse and the workflow unmanageable. You need to think about regulations, hazards, monitoring change, risk management, complying with jurisdictional requirements, audit … the list goes on. Creating a robust safety culture doesn’t happen without ensuring that you are using an efficient and proactive management system.

Outdated technologies have been inefficiently leveraged to support a paper-based system for reporting injuries and accidents at work. There are simply too many moving pieces and occupational risks that must be taken into consideration to rely on spreadsheets. As organizations grow, processes become more complex and integrated. Antiquated safety management systems are unable to scale and provide your organization with tools for proper reporting workflows and incident management.

What are the dangers of using outdated incident reporting tools?

  • Lack of immediacy
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5 Ways Your EHS Spreadsheet is Costing You Money

If your organization is like many, you may still be using a complex set of spreadsheets, emails and macros to manage your health and safety program. After all, that’s how you’ve been managing your EHS program for years, and for years that home grown solution has been “good enough.” But sometimes good enough is not really good enough when you consider the cost implications.

If you have an EHS program in your organization, you’re probably already spending a great deal of time and resources into improving health and safety at your company. However, if you still rely on manual processes, spreadsheets and emails to manage that EHS program then you may be spending far more than you bargained for when you add up the hidden productivity costs of a spreadsheet based system.

Here are 5 hidden costs of a spreadsheet driven EHS program you might not be aware of:

1) Read more...

The Secret to Streamlined Safety Compliance

Let’s face it, the world as we know it is changing. For the most part that’s a very good thing. As health and safety professionals one way that we see these changes is in increasing regulatory pressures. For example, as of January 2015, OSHA has increased pressure on U.S.-based businesses regarding reporting of workplace incidents. These new requirements include reporting work-related fatalities within 8 hours and severe work-related injuries within 24 hours.

Ultimately these changing regulations are a good thing. But the question that’s in the minds of businesses across America is “How can I keep up with these changing regulations, and do it in a way that isn’t disruptive to my business?”

After all, safety isn’t just about the human tragedies that can accompany workplace safety incidents, there is a significant financial cost to noncompliance as well. Fines for noncompliance with these regulations can run into millions of dollars … Read more...

Webinar – Stress-Free OSHA Reporting: Essential Tools to Drive Down Incident Rates

If your company is one of those who is required to keep OSHA’s Injury and Illness log, you’re likely feeling the pain of having to pull together the OSHA 300A Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses that is required to be posted on February 1st. Particularly given the fact that the list of severe work-related injuries that must be reported went under some changes recently and there were several formerly exempt industries that now are required to report.

Many people are managing these reports using spreadsheets and paper, which can be onerous and time consuming. There is a better way! Leveraging technology to streamline the process and get visibility into your injury and illness rates can make a world of difference when it comes to reporting time.

Watch this webinar and you will learn:

  • The challenges and consequences of conventional safety incident reporting.
  • How to strategically streamline safety incident reporting
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Webinar: How Untracked Data Costs Lives and Kills Profit

The classic approach to safety management typically involves documenting recordable incidents, lost time and — whenever they should occur — fatalities. But while this inherently flawed approach works for basic regulatory reporting, it does nothing to proactively reduce injuries, minimize costs and save lives.

To learn how to build the foundation for a proactive safety pyramid in this this Free 30 minute webinar.

Key topics covered include:

  • Highlights from key examples and studies showing the linked between untracked safety metrics and poor safety performance.
  • Revisiting the classic safety pyramid to find a new model for proactive safety management.
  • Strategies and tactics for identifying actionable metrics to improve safety performance.
  • A look at the true ROI of proactive management through tracking leading indicators, and more.

Here is a preview of the webinar:

CLICK HERE to watch the full webinarRead more...

Webinar: Taking the Pain out of Injury & Illness Reporting

Ensuring incident forms are accurate and completed on time is a challenging process for any business. Yet, in order to avoid fines, reduce the chance of costly lawsuits, and stabilize insurance premiums – not to mention proactively mitigate the occurrence of incidents in the future – it is imperative companies stay on top of incident reporting requirements.

In this free 30-minute webinar you will learn how to never miss an incident-related requirement and how companies leverage Intelex’s revolutionary Incident Management application to effortlessly track and report on incidents and boost safety performance.

Key topics covered include:

  • How to develop a streamlined, automated process for documenting and reporting near misses, injuries and recordable incidents.
  • Automating the creation of injury and illness forms specifically for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB), and other regional regulatory bodies around the world.
  • Proactively measure and track all important safety
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Meet an Intelex Client: Ryan Orvis, CHS

Ryan is an Intelex System Administrator at CHS, a Fortune 100 company and leading provider of energy, grain and food solutions. Working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ryan is employed as a Business System Administrator focusing on Risk Management. When he’s asked what it was that made CHS choose Intelex, Ryan doesn’t hesitate.

“We did a full comparison between Intelex and some of the other applications,” Ryan says. “The biggest reason was the flexibility that Intelex gave us.”

Meet an Intelex Client: Ryan Orvis – CHS from Intelex Videos on Vimeo.

When given the chance to elaborate on how Intelex has improved CHS’s business operations, Ryan stresses the value of having a software system that is up to the task of managing the data of a large, international company.

“One of the greatest things about the Intelex system for us is the ability for the system to manage data across … Read more...

The culture of denial, workplace injuries and lessons learned

Try to imagine this workplace injury scenario: A construction worker is seriously hurt on the job. It’s a very minor injury. Years later, under similar circumstances, a worker is killed from a similar incident. Why didn’t the company learn from the first incident?

Recent research in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics suggests three barriers to learning from previous workplace injuries and how companies can overcome them. In Workplace accidents as a source of knowledge: opportunities and obstacles, author Hernani Neto of the Univeresity of Porto, Portugal, suggests workplace injuries and other safety incidents must be understood as a source of knowledge.

However, here is another point that companies need to understand: Safety incidents don’t automatically become an effective source of knowledge. Companies have to work at it. Just because a company suffered a close call or an incident with an employee suffering only minor injuries doesn’t mean … Read more...