“Eat, drink, and be merry,” starts off with a positive premise, but the second part of the common phrase turns stark. It implies that since we can’t predict tomorrow, it’s important to enjoy the present. That might sound like a good way to approach living, but it is not an ideal way to operate organisationally. With your employees and workers at risk of injury and illness, your food and drink enterprise should absolutely be thinking of the future—and making investments in health and safety that can help. Let’s explore the main reasons why.
What puts food and drink workers at risk? Any number of things, as it turns out. The work in the world’s largest industry is fast-paced. Kitchen, food production and preparation lines, and dining area floors are notoriously slick and therefore conducive to slips, trips, and falls. Chopping meat and vegetables often results in severe cuts and other injuries. Manual food handling can spread food-related illnesses. Workers who clean food preparation areas are at the mercy of cleaning chemicals that can harm them if they are not wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) correctly or a PPE shortage affects distribution.
The constant noise in the food and drink industry can create hearing loss. Lifting and carrying heavy trays and the constant repetitive activities of food and drink manufacturing can cause musculoskeletal injuries—some of which are long-term. Another hazard that is often overlooked is the risk of breathing disorders or explosions caused by using flour.
Any of these risks can bring a food or beverage production line to a halt.
Here are 5 ways that SHE Software's platform can improve your health and safety programs and keep production humming along.
To create and sustain positive health and safety in your food and drink enterprise, engaging across the organisation is vital. Our safety management software, Assure, makes it easy for all workers in your organisation to engage with your health and safety team. Assure is designed to be simple and easy-to use so that no hazard or incident goes unrecorded, and follow-up on corrective actions is timely. With Assure, frontline and operational workers can use the AssureGO+ mobile application to record accidents, incidents, and near misses at the time they occur.
As we just discussed, Assure, helps make it easier to keep staff safe from risks, near misses, and hazards. Our platform takes it a step further through enabling leadership to see reports that workers submit, immediately determine which and when checks have been completed, and delegate any actions or investigations to appropriate individuals to be closed out. As a result, it ensures that your staff complete regular inspections, including hygiene checks, risk assessments and equipment maintenance. The result is a reduction in unclean and unsafe errors, which helps keep your staff safe.
Contract tracing to determine who has the coronavirus or who has been in contact with an infected person is critical for tackling COVID-19. Make sure you’re up to date on the latest health and safety requirements around tracking and tracing workers with Assure (here are some tips to reduce the spread). Live COVID-19 forms are available, and you can use AssureGO+ to push those out to your employees without delay. Tracking absences and communicating best practices have never been easier in a time of heightened health awareness.
An accessible and easy-to-use system for health and safety is important to reducing risk everywhere in your food and drink organisation. With Assure, you can complete risk assessments on the go and ensure that they’re reviewed regularly. You can even make sure your employees sign and agree that they have completed relevant training to comply with the actions in the assessment. Furthermore, once employees become accustomed to recording hazards and reviewing risks, their awareness and engagement into your organisation’s health and safety will increase. Employees will start “looking” for hazards, conduct more assessments and actually become active with safety, in turn that will enable you to learn from their outputs.
The health and safety journey is one of continuous improvement and continual learning. Assure Insights+, SHE Software’s business intelligence tool, is designed to make continuous health and safety improvement simple. Offering multiple visualisations, the inclusion of formulas in data presentation, and comprehensive easy-to-use filtering, Assure Insights+ enables data presentation that is easy to understand. You get clear visibility of trends across an entire workforce and their health and safety performance, so you can then proactively identify areas that require focus and deliver additional training to help them improve.
SHE Software’s health and safety management platform delivers the tools you need for total management of risks and incident. You can protect your workers and facilitate the correct usage of PPE, RPE, cleaning chemicals, and equipment. As a result, your production line runs smoothly and you have continuous improvement procedures in place.
Consider scheduling a chat with our food & drink expert, Rosa Gaynor, today to get all the details.