Opportunities from technological solutions are pacing up on rapid progress of the Australian workforce and thus led to new challenges for workplace safety.
First, mobile technology can allow work safety initiatives to go with the rapid changing workplace hazards. The news and information can be easily updated real time, distributed to all parts of the globe and seen straight away by your work safety team in their smartphones. As opposed to documented Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) that are frequently conducted and then left in filing cabinets in each office.
Technology enabled JHA allows the safety officer to analyse the hazards and controls for a new mining process for example. It could identify that other mines in Africa and Canada use the similar process and therefore share this insight with the work safety teams within seconds.
This capability to update and disseminate information fast enough across geographies will allow more adaptable work safety processes, more detailed information and substantial learnings. Thus, it optimises the efficiency of the JHAs at protecting and keeping workers safe from quick changing work hazards in the worksite.
Second, the collection of data for JHA in electronic format allows the work safety officer to extract the important information to share to its workers. Then format that data in a more presentable manner. It is more efficient to create an animation or a training video or even perhaps the classic 3-column JHA, using formatted data for a particular task than getting information that is scrawled on a paper JHA form.
Moreover, technology will permit you to track down if that presentation is successful at attracting the attention of the workers, and can alert you when you are already losing your audience and require you to try a new data format.
Finally, one of the key functions of enterprise-wide JHA software is to detect familiar challenge of tracking worker performance and fostering accountability across different locations. A centralised JHA software system utilised in all worksites within the organisation will ensure that JHAs are complied with in a consistent manner. It can therefore pinpoint where process failures are occurring.
By keeping track that JHAs are performed to an organisation's policy and standards at all times, monitoring compliance can become a side effect of a well-executed work safety program. This will allow the work safety officer to focus his time and resources on what really matters most and that is keeping employees safe and happy.
