By Craig Carlyle, Maintenance Transformations
It seems not that long ago that a health and safety system consisted of a manual, a stock of forms and a folder to store the completed records. Our auditing experience regularly involved blowing the dust off the manual, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.
We realised last century that relying on analogue methods would never satisfy the intent of systemising your learning and ensuring compliance in the long term. We became early adaptors of management information systems, relying on dated methods such as the fax machine. That philosophy was validated in 2016 with the new legislation’s directors’ duties.
With modern Office tools, some shakers and movers used spreadsheets to manage scheduled tasks. These can work adequately, but are single dimensional, only understood by the creator, and prone to edit locking issues on terrestrial servers. Today, our internet infrastructure is reliable and fast enough to tap into the potential of Cloud based systems.
In 2023, the health and safety manager is confronted with a vast menu of options and tools; Cloud or server? Which management software? Phone apps? It can rapidly get confusing, and expensive.
Let’s simplify things a little.
At the heart of your health and safety management, you need a system. Usually presented as a manual, it describes how your operation identifies and controls risks, and manages H&S. No, it is not a collection of downloaded forms. WorkSafe have proven to be unimpressed when prosecuting businesses without a system.
The foundation of your system is your register of reasonably identified hazards and risks and how you intend to control them. The controls and manual will dictate scheduled events (e.g., safety inspections, safety meetings, first aid certification etc.
Procedures are the actions taken as appropriate, inductions, incident reports, training, safety data sheets, safe work instruments, etc. It makes sense that procedures are embedded in your system and readily available and the training recorded.
Understanding the management requirements of a system, you can start building a picture of the requirements of your system. Phone apps are very sexy, useful in the field, and inherently secure, but they are not an ideal health and safety system management tool. Issuing phone apps to overcome worker malaise may not prove to be the panacea desired or make the workplace any safer. If the correct balance is struck it is possible to reap the benefits without getting mesmerised by the tool. Consider too how it will work for your workers. We encounter many sites where there is either no cell coverage, (particularly within sandwich panel buildings), or rules prevent phones inside the working environment.
The Cloud offers many opportunities; transparency, transportability and Cloud based document storage. There are lots of options out there. Check out the country of origin, (local support, boots on the ground, and working knowledge of NZ Law is hard to beat), onboarding cost, annual subscription fee, and user cost. North American systems can be quite expensive once they have their hooks in you and frustrating when you want to talk to a human.
Laying out your requirements may point you to Server or Cloud (web) based management information system (mis) only, mis + tablet and/or mis + phone app. Success will be judged by how carefully you consider these options, beyond the flashy sales pitches. Health and safety system management should be simple, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.
Craig Carlyle is director at Maintenance Transformations. His expertise lies in the practical application of maintenance and health and safety management systems in the workplace. He is also a life member of the Maintenance Engineering Society of NZ.