It’s time to admit something that I’ve been stubbornly ignoring for quite some time: I’m getting old — just ask my daughter, and she’ll confirm.
How do I know this? Why, I’m old enough to remember when our jobsite hazard analyses were done on paper. When we had to sign an actual logbook when we clocked in each morning, or, for that matter, when we had to actually use a punch card to clock in. When we didn’t report a near miss until the end of the day because it required a pencil and paper, and that took time away from getting the job done.
I’m also old enough to remember body belts, but let’s not revisit those dark times. The point is that I come from a workforce generation where we came of age in a decidedly non-digital world. One where issues were handled onsite and not necessarily shared throughout the company. One where paper was king and sending incident reports required a dial-up connection — full disclosure is that I still have an AOL email.
Thankfully, we’ve advanced as a society, both technologically and culturally. Safety is our core value and sending every employee home in the same or even better condition than which they arrived is, or should be by now, our standard. Paper is out; there are now dozens of apps and platforms which allow us to document hazard management in real-time and promulgate findings from individual sites instantaneously across the company — potentially saving lives.
I bring this up because adaptability and evolution are the cornerstones of continuous improvement — moving safety culture and processes ahead, even if incrementally, translates to an incident prevented or a life saved. The seemingly infinite data points that we can now collect through the use of RFID, wearable technology and behavioral profiling all come together to paint a picture that can help us better understand and strengthen human operational performance.
These data points, when viewed through the lens of our VPP-driven corporate safety culture of employee involvement and management commitment to raise the standard for a safe and healthy workplace, give us a previously unrecognized advantage in our quest to save lives.
I recently participated in a call where a technology partner pitched their contribution to continuous improvement in workplace safety and health. In my role as VPPPA executive director, I hear pitches like this on a weekly basis — in other words, my job is to look through the sales pitch and figure out the true benefit to protecting workers. What struck me as an EHS&S construction nerd was the adaptability of the platform. I asked quite a few pointed questions from the user perspective — in this case, VPPPA member — how can I use this platform across sites where different standards may apply? How can I create a standardized, high-performing program where my company may be using VPP requirements in one area and, for example, ISO45001 requirements in another? In case you’re wondering, the chuckles were muted.
We’ve evolved as EHS&S professionals — and even added the extra S to show for it — to accept that capturing data digitally is critical to our programs across the board, from analyzing immediate hazards to predicting future risks. The answer, as it turns out, isn’t the one-size-fits-all approach that we’ve taken for so long.
It’s in creating a tool that allows sites to develop their own risk management development plan which proceeds at their own pace, within their own real-world environmental and regulatory conditions.
In essence, it presents a solution that is adaptable to where each individual site is on its health and safety journey. A solution that allows data tracking on a site-by-site basis that can both be analyzed individually for performance and be aggregated into the overall corporate performance.
This digital (r)evolution in workplace safety and health data has been brewing for years; it’s how we harness the data points — and identify the trends that can lead to true continuous improvement — that will define our future success.
For more information, visit vpppa.org.
