The Missing Piece of the Health and Safety Jigsaw Puzzle Part 4: Informed Decisions

What is the Health and Safety Jigsaw Puzzle? It is a combination of key pieces and technology that can make a big difference in organisational health and safety. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this blog series, we introduced the first three pieces. In this blog post, we’ll look at the fourth piece - informed decisions.

Our last blog post explained how, when people are working together to solve a jigsaw puzzle, they engage. And while they’re engaging, a jumble of jigsaw pieces flows into an ordered arrangement that will become a full picture.

In the Health and Safety Jigsaw Puzzle, the insights generated by the flow of information from engagement can help you make better and smarter environmental, health and safety (EHS) decisions.

EHS decisions: Insight into action

Picture yourself or someone you know trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together. When you opened the box, you saw a huge jumble of pieces, all of which are needed to complete the puzzle picture. If you’re like many people, you turn over all the pieces so you can see which ones go together. This process will help you decide which pieces go where. The same thing happens with health and safety data. It starts as a jumble, but with time, effort, and analysis, you can use it to make decisions. You turn insight into action. mobile devices.

In the puzzle scenario, after you group the pieces, you can make decisions about which ones go together. If the puzzle is one of those 1000-piece monsters, this can be a long and laborious process. It becomes even more so if the puzzle has a repetitive subject, such as an aerial view of a crowd or a massive collection of wine corks (yes, that’s really a puzzle!).

Yet, putting together even a blank or clear jigsaw puzzle is easier than trying to make decisions from separate spreadsheets and paper documents. Distracted from proactive risk reduction, EHS workers often spend up to 80 percent of their time collecting, preparing and analysing data to generate insights that can inform decisions—but, after all this time, they can’t be sure they’re accurate, useful or even still relevant.

Making informed health and safety decisions

In the previous parts to this blog series, we have covered how leadership drives engagement, engagement drives data and now we are at the point where data can drive improvements. How can your organisation stop guessing and start making more informed health and safety decisions? Here are a few examples:

• Trend analysis
  
  Using real-time data visualisations and dashboards, you can spot trends or hot spots that indicate a problem. Trend analysis enables you to proactively determine if the trend is an outlier or something that needs a solution before it is too late.
  
  
• Leading indicator tracking
  
  Create health and safety key performance indicators (KPIs) and then use the leading metrics to drive decisions about how to improve.
  
  
• Prediction and prevention
  
  Use summary reports and metrics to predict where preventative interventions will be most effective.
  
  

Using health and safety management technology to make informed decisions

This informed decision piece of the Health and Safety Jigsaw Puzzle is about using the flow of data from whole organisation EHS engagement to gain insights that drive improved and preventative health and safety programs, actions, and outcomes. For that you need the right health and safety technology.

The right health and safety software enables you to identify trends, track leading indicators and predict where preventative interventions will be most effective—so that everyone in your organisation can benefit from your health and safety programs.

Furthermore, the right EHS software ensures that health and safety management is more than tracking and recording. It delivers the tools you need to use the data you collect to gain insights and take actions that reduce risk across your organisation.

Put the fourth piece in place

All the health and safety jigsaw puzzle pieces fit and build on the previous pieces. Leadership drives engagement, engagement drives data, data drives informed decisions, decision drives improvement, and continuous improvement drives leadership. Join us next week as we discuss how the informed decisions piece fits into our Health and Safety Jigsaw Puzzle.

In the meantime, why not talk to us about how our health and safety management software solution provides the data, information flow, and insights needed to promote a proactive health safety culture.