The organisation of safety in the Workplace

Organising the work

I have met excellent professionals, nearly all of them with a passion for their job. Now I’ll explain why: in a context as dispersive as this they all have to be their own bosses, professionals who know how to manage the complexity of the client from A to Z. It does not matter whether the client is a beautician’s salon or a company with hundreds of employees, the approach is nearly always “leave it to me”. Therefore if the job in hand is not divided into stages, into distinct components able to be elaborated separately, if you do not keep track of the advancement of the activities and it all lays on the shoulders of the single professional, then it can never be anything but like this.

I do not have a magic wand for this subject, all I can say is that the software tools used today for safety in the workplace management are not really suitable. Not only do they not help organise the job in hand but often actually hinder it.

Explicit and hidden requests

The majority of the requests expressed explicitly are quite obvious:

• Risk Assessment Document Compilation: often who asks for this, secretly hopes that the system can magically produce a document. But you know better than me that the Risk Assessment Document is the end result of a highly detailed collection of information and consequent analysis of it, in which you are experts.
• Deadline calendar: also in this case I felt the desire for the system to automatically produce the deadline calendar. Unfortunately also in this case there is no magic solution, no system can remember your partner’s birthday if it has not been trained by you to do so!
• Processes: I have to admit this point is not clear to me yet. I obviously know what a process is, but because I know what one is and how many variables and details are necessary to express it, in this case I cannot usefully or efficiently identify it for it then to be designed (but it is an on-going challenge).
• Reports: apart from the fact that in this case the system cannot do anything but carry over data previously entered by someone, this request is quite clear.

So now let us get to the non-explicit requests. In my previous experience these remain intended but after several meetings/interviews we are able to make them emerge. In the case of safety in the workplace we had to “get on with it ourselves”.

• Division with the team: it should be the possible for several people to work simultaneously also from different locations. Obviously, how else can you parallelise the work? How can I delegate jobs, even simple data entry, to other people in the team?
• Division with the client:: there should be the possibility to share data with the client. However good you are, you cannot know if the company has hired a new person or bought a new piece of equipment. Why not delegate them to provide all this information?
• Control of accesses: a system which shares information does not have to mean that everyone can do everything, each one to his own.
• All in one place: as safety in the workplace experts, you often have to deal with many clients and with many safety projects. I believe that being able to manage them all from one place is important. For example I would want the deadline calendar to include all my clients rather than having to opens tens (or hundreds) of deadline calendars to find out the deadlines for the following months.

Are you curious to see the result?

As I told you at the beginning, sometimes we are asked to carry out an analysis, sometimes to analyse and coordinate, others times to do both these and develop a system.

In this case they asked us to do everything, including software. If you are a bit curious and want to see the result of our efforts, you can, by trying 4hse the software for safety in the workplace management. As with all software, it is in constant evolution, our analysis has not finished and we like to think it will never be finished, infinite variants of our fantastic work.

So speak to you soon!