Automating Health & Safety to Turbo-Charge Your Business

We’ve talked about how EHS can make a big difference to an organization’s operations, like its ability to drive operational excellence, and how incorporating it into your core business values can boost success, as explained by our CEO Matthew Elson. As Matthew points out, not only does it bring a lot of positives to the business but fail to look after EHS properly and the consequences can be disastrous.  

In the US for example, Liberty Mutual’s safety index 2021 reported that the top 10 causes of workplace injuries cost U.S. businesses alone more than $1 billion a week. In a report (2022), the International Labor Organization (ILO) noted that the annual cost of injuries at work to the global economy is a staggering $1.25 thousand billion. 

Yet incredibly, despite all these statistics showing the hidden cost of poor EHS management, some still see it as a burden to manage.  

Understanding the job at hand 

To understand how EHS can drive success, it’s helpful to understand what the average working day looks like for a health and safety manager. Many of you reading this will be well versed in what the job entails, but for those who aren’t, it is incredibly data driven. Data is at the heart of everything a health and safety manager does, from creating, collating and analyzing data and key metrics – to completing risk assessments and incident management reports, carrying out regular audits and checking records.  

It’s a multifaceted role that can be extremely time-consuming, particularly if processes are outdated and reports are input manually into different spreadsheets and workflows. Time spent on these tasks is often at the expense of more forward-thinking, strategic activities, like moving from a reactive to a predictive safety strategy and ultimately optimizing costs for the business. 

The power of automation  

Automating and streamlining as many of these time-consuming tasks as possible is precisely what good health and safety technology looks to support. 

There are many benefits to using EHS software, from supporting your business strategy, regardless of your industry, to potentially saving you money, and enabling return on investment. It’s no wonder that Gartner’s survey of CFOs this summer found that most are planning to prioritize investments in back-office automation as a key lever to driving down costs in the face of ongoing inflation. It’s an approach that has already proved valuable time and again across other business functions that have traditionally been reliant on spreadsheets and complicated workflows.  

A smarter approach 

So, what does this look like in reality? Of course, every business’ health and safety processes are unique to their operation but let’s walk you through a generalized example to help bring this to life. These figures will of course vary depending on the business and the number of incidents that occur but to provide you with a flavor of savings that you could make – at a minimum, imagine your health and safety manager has to run: 

• 1 risk assessment a month 

• 4 incident reports 

• 3 investigations 

• 1 audit to then create 2 management reports  

S/he then spends 40% of their time reviewing records to complete all these tasks and administer one claim a month. By using health and safety software to automate these processes s/he could potentially save your business a minimum of 14 hours in time spent at an average cost of $4,347 per month. That’s an estimated 24 days of time and $52,185 saved per year. Not a bad figure to subtract from your outgoings or to funnel back into value-adding activities. An extra 24 days could really help you gain more value from your health and safety data and enable you to move from a reactive to a proactive approach. Of course, there is no hard or fast rule around these calculations, but you get the idea: a smarter approach to business results in greater efficiencies that results in time and cost optimizations.  

Having all actions in one system with automated reminders can save a lot of time and ensure you are staying on top of all actions, allowing everything to be completed more efficiently.  

For more insights and information on this topic, why not tune in to hear our two favorite bald guys, Julian and Langdon, reflect on the questions that you should be asking about your EHS data in the ‘How to gain more value from your EHS data’ episode of their podcast. 

Smarter, faster, automated 

In a world where certainty, efficiency, cost-reduction and the ability to focus on the value-add is everything, automating processes to make your safety strategy smarter can make a huge difference. If you’re keen to calculate the time and money health and safety software can bring to your business, then check out our free Operational Efficiency ROI calculator. And if you feel like you could use some support turning your calculator results into a robust business case to get your leadership team on board, then check out our ‘Showing the value of your investment’ guide.