The new normal for HSE professionals, leveraging digital tools for healthier and safer workplace
How do health, safety, and environment (HSE) professionals in our new covid 19 world help companies and business decision makers make choices or take actions that make their workplace healthier, safer, more secure and environmentally friendly to their workers?
The traditional approach used to fulfill this responsibility is based on lots of paperwork in the office and the field , more people for routine inspection and data collection on incident, safety briefing and talks delivered in groups of people involved in same project etc…In covid 19 post pandemic world this traditional approach does not work anymore. The traditional paper and labor intensive based approach and methods provide avenues for virus transmission in the workplace. How do you manage health and safety with reduced human presence and intervention when the equipment and plants are still in operation?
HSE professionals at operations level historically are and still data collectors and analyst and less involved in building or improving the management system required to effectively manage changes.
The role of health, safety, security and environmental professionals need to evolve and adapt to the challenge of the day: More safety with less people and paperwork: How do you assure and actually protect workers, how do you protect equipment from catastrophic failures and avoid accidental releases, fire , explosion?
HSSE professionals need to be more prepared and better equipped not only for covid 19 but for more to come as this may be a real beginning of a long period of pandemics or unusual events weʼve never taught off . Instead of just focusing and fire fighting, deploying few patching measures for return to work or just install gadgets , the HSE professionals need to think and use a system based approach to address the challenges in a sustainable way. Though the fundamentals of health, safety ,and environment management systems have not really changed , adjustments are needed in the way its pillars are built, implemented and performance measured. Changing and adapting the system is changing the game.
HSE professionals need to trigger, lead discussions around the transformation of their organization from redefining and refocusing leadership and commitment from the top of the organization , HSE policies , standards , documentation, risk management, incident prevention, incident investigation and corrective actions implementation, HSE auditing and performance review
Every good performance starts with good leadership and commitment. How do you get leaders to still fully commit to the few essential things that matter at all times to assure workers and guarantee their health and safety in times like this and beyond when they think about surviving as a business with shrinking revenues, downsizing, closing down operating sites etc…? What does leadership and commitment mean to managers at levels below and what are the expectations from them? What are they really doing now? Do they focus on themselves or their team’s health and safety? Do they just ignore, postpone those dangerous but required regular inspections due to reduced manpower or do they find new ways to get things done in a more effective way?
Real leadership and commitment to health, safety, security and related costs are already hard to get in most organizations in a normal and prosperous situation. It’s shocking to see the unnecessary discussion around use of face masks to protect people when there is evidence that masks do provide a certain good level of protection and use of masks has been long adopted in plants and factories without discussion. This is a leadership issue and HSE professionals have been either absent , quiet or seem to have abandoned the field to people making bad decisions that expose people and or delay their protection. How do the entire relevant organization policies in place at the workplace contribute or help solve the challenges of the day? Are they still relevant ? Do they promote transmission of diseases at the workplace? How do you stop , modify , find ways that reduce people’s exposure to achieve desired objectives? Silent transmission actually occurs in basic things people do regularly and then tend to forget or ignore the inherent risk as times go by. For example, almost all companies have embarked on work from home, is your company policy comprehensive in whatʼs required to continue protecting the health and safety of the relevant employees as they are on duty for the organization? There are lots of cases of contamination from people on work-from-home schedules either because they take more chances outside the office or relax in a family environment or just spend the additional hours gained on other risky activities
Incident prevention in health, safety and environment starts with effective assessment of hazards related to the projects, work to be done and their potential impacts followed by identification of the right and adequate controls starting with a careful design and selection of the right equipments, mitigation measures and most importantly maintaining the effectiveness and quality of the controls in place throughout the project execution period.
How do you get quality, better, stronger, more effective risk assessment done today with less paperwork and expertise ? How do you collect data during projectsʼ execution without sending lots of safety inspectors to site? Do your people have the right and adequate tools that prevent cross contamination, relevant and readily available standards to do a good job, disinfection of equipment?
How do the entire relevant organization policies in place at the workplace contribute or help solve the challenges of the day? Are they still relevant ? Do they promote transmission of diseases at the workplace? How do you stop , modify , find ways that reduce people’s exposure to achieve desired objectives? Silent transmission actually occurs in basic things people do regularly and then tend to forget or ignore the inherent risk as times go by. For example, almost all companies have embarked on work from home, is your company policy comprehensive in whatʼs required to continue protecting the health and safety of the relevant employees as they are on duty for the organization? There are lots of cases of contamination from people on work-from-home schedules either because they take more chances outside the office or relax in a family environment or just spend the additional hours gained on other risky activities. Incident prevention in health, safety and environment starts with effective assessment of hazards related to the projects, work to be done and their potential impacts followed by identification of the right and adequate controls starting with a careful design and selection of the right equipments, mitigation measures and most importantly maintaining the effectiveness and quality of the controls in place throughout the project execution period.
How do you get quality, better, stronger, more effective risk assessment done today with less paperwork and expertise ? How do you collect data during projectsʼ execution without sending lots of safety inspectors to site? Do your people have the right and adequate tools that prevent cross contamination, relevant and readily available standards to do a good job, disinfection of equipment?
• There is more at stake than just putting the basic temperature screening to monitor employee body temperature or provide face masks at the entrance of company premises.
• Effective Health and safety professionals live up to the challenge by going beyond regulatory agenciesʼ prescription and really work on the entire management system needed to protect workers and safety of the business in the long run.
• Its essential to keep working on leadership and commitment from the top of the organization , updating existing policies , standards , documentation, finding and providing new ways to do risk management and incident prevention, address incident root causes, corrective actions implementation and measuring performance.
HSE professionals more than ever can have more impact on their workplace today with all the tools available as we struggle to go through this pandemic period
