Is Your Safety Program Delivering Enough Value?

For many organizations, a safety program is the cost of doing business—essential for maintaining the welfare of workers, avoiding compliance penalties and controlling insurance costs—but often not a strategic priority. With increasing competitive pressure, economic volatility and stakeholder expectations, a passive and reactive approach to workplace safety simply can’t deliver enough value throughout your organization—or to your bottom line. “Good enough” isn’t, anymore.

Innovative organizations are becoming the top industry financial performers, with a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to safety now a strategic focus for many of them. Industry studies are demonstrating time after time that there is a direct relationship between strong safety cultures and higher productivity and profitability.

Safety is No Accident

Preventing the impacts of at-risk workplace behaviors doesn’t just help to reduce costs—it improves operating performance and expands revenue generating capacity. But getting there presents a challenge that is motivating many businesses to view safety in a broader organizational context. To do that, they start with understanding all the dimensions of safety, and identifying the critical missing pieces that are standing in the way of a high-performing safety culture.

Safety Culture & Safety Climate: Gaining Insight from Behavior

Make no mistake, even without your active engagement and participation, your safety culture will define itself—and not for the better. To build a high-performing safety culture, your organization must be an active agent of change focused on increasing the value of safety across the enterprise. Because a safety culture reflects your organization’s longer-term commitment to safety and the shared values that surround it, it tends to evolve more slowly over time. Your organization’s safety climate, on the other hand, is a much more fluid response to workplace safety that reflects the perceived state of safety at any given point in time.

Safety culture and safety climate are different expressions of workplace safety, but go hand in hand. Influencing a healthier safety climate from day to day and, ultimately, a high-performance safety culture over time involves addressing behavior and communication. When your organization commits to changing at-risk behaviors and learning from mistakes, it sets the stage for a stronger safety culture.
It sends a consistent message to workers on the front lines and executives making key operating decisions: safety depends on how we behave—individually, and as a group with shared values and goals.

If you don’t invest in observing and identifying at-risk behaviors, it’s hard to gain the insight necessary to make key safety decisions—decisions that can dramatically improve both the welfare of your workers, as well as your organization’s key performance indicators. What’s more, if you don’t communicate those key behavioral insights to employees at every level of the corporate structure, disengagement will further erode your safety culture.

Behavior-Based Safety: Harnessing the Data

When your organization considers making the leap into a formalized Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) program, observing and capturing safety behavior data becomes paramount. This critical moment can define the success—or failure—of a BBS program for any organization.

Because at-risk behaviors are usually captured on paper forms by workers in the field, organizations can face a host of data collection, entry and processing problems. Data that remains trapped in paper forms can diminish the value of your safety observation program and undermine every aspect of your safety culture. It inhibits the reinforcement of positive behavioral changes that help to foster continued engagement with workers and build good will. It leads to a communication breakdown, potentially increasing both the number and severity of at-risk behaviors that result in more workplace injuries and higher insurance premiums. And it delays time-sensitive operating decisions that directly affect productivity and profitability.

If you’re considering a behavior-based approached to safety, you need to be proactive about transforming your data into insight – insight that enables better, faster safety decisions across your entire organization.

SafetyCapture®: An Integrated Behavior-Based Safety System

Ensure your behavior-based safety program is a critical component of your organization’s holistic safety strategy with proven return on investment. SafetyCapture® delivers the behavior-based safety system and integrated services you need to build a high-performance safety culture. It starts with a strategic, 360° approach to your data: how you collect and capture it, how you process it, and how
you communicate timely safety insight throughout your organization.

Capture the Right Data, the Right Way—the First Time

When it comes to safety observation data, you can’t measure what don’t capture—and you get what you measure. Capturing the right data, the right way, is a critical first step in your behavior-based safety program. Once you’ve decided the key safety observations you want to capture, SafetyCapture helps you optimize the design of your safety observation forms for automated data collection.

Professionally designed forms are easy for workers to complete, setting the stage for rapid scanning and processing of your time-sensitive safety observation data. By supporting a best-practice approach focused on automation, we help to accelerate the transformation of your raw safety data into actionable insight you can share through your reporting and feedback systems.

  • Ensures clearer, easy-to-complete forms with established rules
  • Helps you capture the right safety information on your forms for higher quality data

Automate Data Processing & Eliminate Inefficient Manual Entry

Once you launch your BBS program, it can be a struggle to find the time, budget and resources it takes to manually enter safety observation and audit forms. Manual entry is a process fraught with inefficiency, high error rates and long delays that can threaten the integrity of your safety culture. SafetyCapture® onDemand provides high-speed scanners that automate the collection and processing of data in your safety observation forms—clean, error-free data you can quickly validate and convert into any format you need.

To further control capital expenditures, you can also choose to use any scanning hardware you already own that meets image quality requirements. The faster you make high-quality data available to your reporting systems, the sooner you can deliver the insights that drive measurable reductions in at-risk and near-miss behaviors.

  • Recognizes and processes all hand- and machine-printed data and exports it into the data formats you specify
  • High-speed, efficient scanning optimized to work with your customized forms
  • Allows you to work with your data within hours—not days or weeks
  • Accelerates data proofing and correction for improved accuracy

Deliver Safety Insights & Timely Feedback to Every Decision Maker

Once SafetyCapture frees your data from the prison of paper observation forms, it delivers the reporting and distribution tools that help you get safety insights into the right hands. From workers who make critical on-the-job decisions to senior executives accountable for the bottom line, SafetyCapture™ helps everyone in your organization contribute to a stronger, more engaged safety culture.

Reporting options include key summary and trend reports to track the top workplace hazards and at-risk behaviors, as well as custom reports that can be tailored to your unique safety observation program. Have your own reporting tools? With SafetyCapture, you also have the flexibility to integrate your own in-house or third-party reporting system.

  • Flexible reporting options enable you to transform form data into critical insight, trends and key indicators
  • Integrated reporting helps you gain rapid visual access to scanned data—eliminates the need to manipulate, translate and merge data after it has been verified
  • Tailor reports to the right stakeholders throughout your organization

Move Beyond Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

SafetyCapture dramatically reduces the time and resource cost that comes with manual data entry. With this major constraint removed, your organization can track trends and performance data across the entire enterprise, including multiple processes and production sites. Expand your safety observation strategy and move beyond KPIs to uncover key trends that could be contributing to operating inefficiency, poor productivity and increased safety risks. SafetyCapture not only improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of behavior-based safety programs—it gives you the tools you need to turn your safety culture vision into practical, achievable reality.