Challenges in H&S compliance management

One of the biggest challenges in health and safety compliance management is discovering what we don’t know, or don’t know to ask. In other words, we need to understand how to engage in proactive risk identification and risk management planning. With disconnected systems managing different parts of your health and safety compliance processes, it’s difficult to see the big picture: What is happening in your facilities, and what are all of the compliance obligations, potential risks, and liabilities across your sites.

Another challenge is having non-EHS employees responsible for completing EHS tasks. Due to budgetary or resource challenges, it’s not always possible to have an experienced EHS expert managing and executing EHS all tasks. Although these tasks can still be completed, they may not have the experience and insight to manage the task execution with the broader implications and dependencies in mind.

The third major challenge for health and safety compliance management is producing reports to regulators that need to be submitted on a regular basis. You need to have confidence that those reports are correct, comprehensive, and submitted on time.

Taking steps to reduce your H&S compliance risks

Building a “safety first” culture can go a long way toward reducing health and safety compliance risks and increasing the effectiveness of your health and safety programs. This can be challenging because you must change the way your employees think about their daily tasks, to help ensure that everyone takes responsibility for contributing to health and safety excellence and to complying with program requirements and regulations. Maintaining a “safety first” culture can help identify where risks are in your operations and where to put measures in place to reduce or eliminate those risks.

How your company manages its health and safety program data can play a big role in successfully building a “safety first” culture. Whether you manage your health and safety program data using manual or analog methods, using digital methods, or a using combination of different methods, the decisions you make for how you manage your data will impact employee participation in the health and safety program, will provide management with awareness of health and safety activities and compliance status across sites, and will facilitate regulatory reporting.

The manual or analog methods for H&S management have their own set of challenges. For instance, paper forms and spreadsheets present version control issues, which make managing and enforcing changes difficult as both your organization and the regulatory environment may change over time. Adding to the complexity of the manual method of H&S is the need for visibility and reporting across multiple sites that may not be using the same forms or tools. This disjointed, manual approach makes it almost impossible to have a comprehensive and reliable view of the organization’s compliance, risks and liabilities.

How digital solutions maximize H&S program performance

Fortunately, digital solutions address the challenges of health and safety compliance management by enabling your H&S management processes, not replacing them. Thus, with clearly defined processes for managing H&S compliance, digital solutions will facilitate the standardization of those processes across sites.

Digital solutions make it easier to for site-level employees to execute the steps of the compliance process, and for managers to perform trend analysis and reporting. Digital solutions also provide for the optimization of processes by identifying and implementing incremental improvements over time. With the right solutions, you not only meet compliance obligations, but add value to your organization through continuous improvement and optimization.

Lastly, leveraging digital solutions for your H&S management enables increased visibility to the data to make better preventive and corrective decisions that will reduce the risks and costs associated with non-compliance, while increasing employee safety and operational compliance

Integrating H&S compliance processes for improved program performance

Your health and safety compliance program likely includes a number of different processes, such as incident management, task management, corrective and preventative action plans, risk and opportunity management, and management of change. With a digital solution for H&S compliance management, you can implement point solutions focused on each of these different sub-processes, which can work together towards an integrated program; or, you can implement an enterprise-wide solution like Enablon, which provides additional capabilities for connecting together these different program components.

Connecting your different health and safety processes together grants insight into your risks across sites. Using an integrated solution connects your teams and sites to gain a better understanding of your compliance footprint across the company and allows you to better focus your investments and resources over time. An added value of the integrated solution is efficiency, as your employees will be able to complete their processes more quickly and easily.

Improve your incident management process with digital solutions

Let’s take a look at one of the common processes in H&S compliance management programs, Incident Management, to better understand the value of implementing an integrated digital solution. Reporting injuries and illnesses is one key part of the incident management process. This step represents the bare minimum of data collection and reporting that should be included in any good incident management process. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg; there are more data you can gather to better manage your incidents, to optimize your health and safety program, and to reduce your organization’s risk profile over time. For instance, consider sharing among sites the lessons learned and preventive steps that have been identified
as part of the incident investigation process. Sites with similar equipment and operations can learn from each other’s incidents to help prevent incidents from recurring across your facilities. Also consider the kinds of data derived from root cause analyses and incident investigations that can improve your processes and enhance operations. This may lead you to identify gaps in your employee training and awareness program, for example.

A digital solution is the tool to facilitate your incident management process and to guide sites and users toward standardization of data. It is also important that you find a balance between delivering value for your organization and minimizing the challenges that digital systems can introduce to employees. Achieving this balance should remain top of mind as organizations and regulations change over time. Allow for incremental optimization of your solution as these changes occur.

Practical tips for incident management

The key for incident management is to implement a system that’s robust enough to capture a variety of data while being streamlined and user-friendly. With that in mind, consider these practical tips for digitizing your incident management process.

• Go beyond asking “What happened?” when it comes to incident investigation. Direct more focus on data quality and the type of information that’s needed to help analyze trends across sites and to prevent future incidents from occurring.
• Streamline data collection and user experience by minimizing free text fields, as these are notoriously difficult to report on for trend analysis. Instead, create pre-defined values that make sense for your organization that users can easily select from when entering their data.
• Consider minimizing optional fields, and instead focus on collecting the key, required fields that add value for your organization. Optional fields that are skipped have low value for trend analysis and can cause confusion for contributor users who are not sure which data they actually need to enter into the system.
• Share key data across compliance modules with your organization. You can use a high-learning value event feature and distribute that information and preventive actions to similar sites.
• Use templating functionality with action plans to deliver useful information across your organization and to encourage sites to take action promptly when an incident occurs.

Improve your EHS compliance tasking process with digital solutions

Now let’s look at another common part of H&S compliance management programs, Task Management, to further assess the value of implementing an integrated digital solution. For your EHS compliance tasking process, you need the ability to assign tasks with specific due dates to specific employees. These tasks are meant to keep sites in compliance with relevant regulatory information. While this may seem simple enough, there are still several common challenges when it comes to compliance tasking.

For one, different teams may manage tasks in different systems with different tools within a site or across sites. As an example, the maintenance department may use a work order system to manage their tasks, and the EHS team may use spreadsheets to manage their compliance tasks. Still other groups may use a shared Outlook calendar. This system lacks coordination which leads to miscommunication, duplicated work, not knowing the tasks and deadlines, and having to update data in more than one place. Additionally, it’s difficult or impossible for managers to see the big picture in meeting compliance objectives and know where to invest resources across their organization.

There are other tricky situations for compliance tasking, such as tasks with relative due dates. An example of a relative due date is maintenance that must be completed within 18 months of the last maintenance event, which can’t simply be marked on a calendar in advance. Instead, you need to prove when the last maintenance event took place in order to know when the next maintenance task is due. This type of dynamic scheduling can be managed well by some digital solutions, such as Enablon, but it requires a bit of forethought and training to ensure your employees are scheduling these types of tasks correctly and maintaining proper records of task completion.

Event-based tasks are also tricky because those due dates are dependent on events occurring that are not regularly scheduled. You may not have to act at all, until a specific event occurs. When the event occurs, this will trigger action. It can be difficult to track the due dates for these types of tasks because of their irregular frequency/occurrence.

Another complex tasking situation is present in continuous tasks, which are always necessary and in effect, such as dust control requirements, record keeping requirement, and continuous monitoring. It can be difficult to manage these continuous compliance tasks because they require constant action without a relevant due date, and are therefore difficult to manage in a compliance calendar.

Practical tips for EHS compliance tasking

A digital solution can address the challenges presented for EHS compliance tasking. Consider the following practical tips to improve your compliance tasking process.

• Build tools to facilitate communication across teams and systems. Even if you prefer separate systems for different teams, you still need a way to share data across those systems. One option is to set up notifications to push data to those who may not be users of the system. These people can then be notified if a task has been assigned to them through those email notifications.
• Develop IT system integrations to let systems share data directly with each other. This way, systems stay synchronized, and you can avoid situations of missing or duplicate tasks. This is a more comprehensive approach to tasking across sites.
• Create a centralized dashboard for your data with an OData tool like Enablon Blink, or by developing a “data lake” with a centralized report and dashboard tool. Even if your systems are separate, your data can be integrated in one place or tool.
• Keep systems simple for your users and focus on optimizing data collection. Think about who your users are (e.g., management, task owners, plant managers) and what their specific needs are. Use that information to build a tasking form or tool that is focused on collecting the specific data that will give your users what they need.
• Leverage cross-module capabilities. For example, you can use compliance task tables in conjunction with action plans and inspections. These modules work together as part of your compliance assurance system.

Overall benefits of digital solutions for H&S program performance

Digitizing EHS processes reduces the risks and costs related to non-compliance, which is just the starting point. Moreover, digital solutions allow you to go beyond compliance to add value to your organization by establishing a system to identify and deploy incremental improvements over time. With a digital solution, you can evaluate the effectiveness of implemented improvements and push additional improvements to your system based on that feedback.

Increasing the visibility of your EHS data through a digital solution also gives you the benefit of focusing on preventive and proactive risk identification. The data from a digital solution helps you prioritize preventive and corrective actions, enable a safety-first culture, and improve your operations.

Lastly, digital solutions give you the ability to standardize processes and data, which saves time and effort and drives efficiency. From the users entering the data to the managers consuming the data, digital solutions make work simpler and more effective, allowing you more time to identify system improvements and strengthen EHS processes.

Trinity Consultants would like to thank our partner, Wolters Kluwer Enablon, for the presentation of these insights during our joint webinar, “Digitizing Health & Safety management to maximize performance.” Find the webinar recording on demand here.