Go Evo’s Ultimate Guide To Organizational Compliance
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As an employer, there’s nothing more important than keeping everyone on your premises safe. This may include your staff members, visitors, guests or third parties.
However, organizations across every industry face two main challenges. On the one hand, workplace health and safety compliance regulations are often complex, with only a handful of solutions to streamline them. On the other hand, since no two workplaces are the same, compliance issues are often industry-specific, and the need for a customized solution is paramount.
In our guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about compliance and why your organization needs to stay on top of it. Plus, we detail the big challenges of compliance in 2022 and the importance of having a digital solution at your side.
Organizational Compliance Is Never Optional
Noncompliance can have serious costs. Not only is compliance essential to manage the many risks that arise from various industry and government environments, but missing the mark can have serious consequences.
The best workplace H&S compliance strategy consists of assessing the risk factors and incidences that may present themselves on your premises, then developing a plan to mitigate them.
In a survey included in the Risk and Compliance Benchmark Report, nearly 80% of respondents admitted that they had a business continuity plan that helped them navigate the pandemic’s impact. So while a compliance strategy helps boost everyday productivity, it also enables you to act quickly in response to unforeseen events.
What Is Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) Compliance?
Ensuring that your work environment complies with local and federal health and safety laws involves taking precautionary and necessary steps to keep everyone who works or enters your workplace as safe as possible. Compliance protocols are not only designed for the safety of your staff but also for your clients, contractors, visitors, customers or anyone who associates with your business operations.
To stay compliant with the workplace health and safety protocols, you must have solutions and strategies to continuously assess your premises for existing or potential threats to safety. At the same time, it must include ideas to reduce, eliminate or mitigate the hazards.
Depending upon the industry type, your safety obligations may vary. For instance, manufacturing operations may need to keep track of their fleet in real-time, while an enterprise may lean on record-keeping of employee certificates and updated training records. But in any case, all businesses need to comply with certain basic obligations to:
- Encourage and provide a safe workspace
- Eliminate or reduce incidents and risks
- Perform recurring assessments to identify potential hazards
- Keep employee training documents and other certificates up-to-date
Top 7 Compliance Challenges in 2022 and Beyond
Compliance is an umbrella term encompassing various factors that contribute to the overall safety of everyone involved or associated with your organization. In the workplace health and safety realm, compliance isn’t just about your employees on-site but also en route. In that case, it also involves managing human safety and inspection of your fleet, vehicle inspection and more.
We’ve listed some challenging areas that might benefit from a digitized health and safety solution in 2022 and the future.
1. Incident and Injury Reporting
According to the 2021 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index, serious non-fatal workplace injuries amounted to nearly $59 billion in direct U.S. workers' compensation costs in 2018. This translates into more than a billion dollars a week spent by U.S. businesses on these injuries.
While accidents may be an unavoidable part of the nature of your work, you can surely take the necessary steps to bring quick resolution. By creating a workplace incident report, you can collate all the information about the accident, the injury, all parties involved in the accident, and any near misses and damage or safety threats that may have occurred in the workplace.
“Large organizations can spend on average $1 Million on incident response.”
You can also designate necessary action steps to take resolution-based actions. Incident reporting is an important part of your health and safety plan as it not only helps to identify the incident’s primary cause and any related hazards but also helps prevent it from happening again in the future.
2. Workplace Hazard Assessment
A safety strategy cannot exist without regular workplace hazard assessments. The process includes identifying, assessing and controlling workplace hazards to reduce worker health and safety risks.
Establishing an effective hazard assessment plan will help to minimize risks, boost compliance, stay aligned with workplace safety regulations and promote a safe work environment. It also includes risk assessment that proactively determines the level of risk for any new job task.
While risk assessment is not necessary for recurring and routine tasks, a solid health and safety solution should automate this process and notify you which risks are the most serious ones and which hazards need priority
3. Workplace Certification and Compliance
Only 29% of organizations report that they assess compliance proficiencies and skills of their staff on an ongoing basis, but what if you can manage to keep all the important records updated and ready for audits, anytime and from anywhere?
In order to stay ahead of all mandatory requirements, companies are ditching paper-based workflows. Instead, they are maintaining and managing digitized libraries of workplace certifications, including employee training documents.
With a health and safety app, you can encourage and empower employees to submit their records in a timely manner, complete training on time and manage their documents systematically to help your organization maintain logs.
4. Safety Talks
If you run critical government operations or are involved in manufacturing or mining, you must be aware of how toolbox talks can promote safety in the workplace.
It is a hands-on way to remind workers that health and safety are critical parts of the job culture. They are focused on a particular safety concern and are meant to raise awareness for workers to take a safety-first approach while doing their routine tasks.
By introducing safety talks in your work culture, you’ll educate your workers about overall safety and stay compliant with the Occupational Health and Safety Standards.
5. Resource Centre
Another important way to ensure your organization is fully compliant is by allowing your employees to access important information without any hassle. All members must have access to health and safety policies and procedures, standard operating procedures and any other resources uploaded by the management.
There should also be a system for top management and senior leadership to identify if team members have acknowledged critical documents. This way, you can ensure policy compliance across your organization.
6. Vehicle and Equipment Inspections
As mentioned before, workplace health and safety also involve safety concerns associated with your fleet while they’re on their job duties outside your premises. For the most part, this includes any vehicle or equipment that they are using.
A ready templated vehicle inspection form helps you document the vehicle’s condition in detail. The workflow you set up not only helps to verify the vehicle’s roadworthiness but also ensures that all the parties involved in the job task have performed their due diligence.
Accessing all this information from a single dashboard, performing pre-start checks and regular vehicle inspections proactively reduce risks of en-route mishaps and operational downtime.
7. Vaccination and Test Tracking
The pandemic was an excellent example and a learning experience for most organizations to keep a backup safety plan to keep operations ongoing during critical crises. As work resumed after the pandemic, most companies leaned on a COVID-19 vaccination and safety plan.
A robust solution means you can compile employee vaccination and test records in one place. It provides your employees with the tools they need to track vaccinations and tests by easily uploading their records in a matter of seconds. The dashboard shows you exactly when workers have taken their COVID-19 test and who has an upcoming scheduled test or is pending results.
The 3 Biggest Benefits of a Digital Health and Safety Compliance Solution
Digital processes make it quite easy and manageable to stay on top of compliance, no matter your industry type or size. Here are the three biggest reasons to digitize your WHS compliance.
Smarter Reportings Means More Critical Data Captured
Mobile traffic accounts for approximately half of the web traffic worldwide. By this year, mobile data traffic is expected to hit a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent.
The increasing trend to lean on mobile for everything demands a mobile solution that lets you work anytime, anywhere. With your fleet travelling far off, workers working round the clock in different shifts or probably working in a hybrid model, it’s quite possible for them to legitimately forget to pre-clear important tasks or log some critical information.
An advanced mobile compliance platform ensures this doesn’t happen. Equipped with powerful reporting capabilities, you can receive notifications, view reports and log data on the go. By managing data from a single dashboard, you can have more insights into how different departments operate and collaborate and make sure that all reports are up-to-date.
Improve Supervision with Streamlined Program Management
A digital health and safety platform also comprises custom workflows and forms that help you streamline your operations. You can skip the endless paper trails and shift your processes to a more digitized solution that provides complete transparency and control of decisions you’d have otherwise missed.
From the project management perspective, the most advanced platform can help you oversee administrative functions and supervise critical tasks. Instant notifications help you flag suspicious activities and escalate or assign them to the concerned stakeholders. Besides, consolidated forms and activity logs give you a history of previous reviews.
Increased Efficiency Means More Productivity
According to Statista, in 2020, worldwide spending on digital transformation reached 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars. The utility of digital platforms to simplify everyday processes is something companies must experience to truly understand. Instant reports, quick notifications, systematic logs and data consolidated in one spot allows you to make assessments and easily view all activities across departments.
But ideally, a solution should show improvement in two ways: the organization’s ability to stay in compliance and to push the management to enforce compliance for increased productivity and efficiency.
The on-compliance features should give you instant visibility into the well-being of your team, while other advanced features like tracking your fleet in real-time, conducting digital safety talks, and completing equipment safety logs should scale your organization towards staying on top of all necessary regulations.
Try Go Evo’s Digital Health and Safety Compliance Solutions
The safer your workplace is, the less likely your employees will suffer from hazards or incidences.
Go Evo’s digital compliance platform is one of the most advanced solutions to help your workplace stay compliant. It merges the powerful functionality of top-tier operations management software, while still managing to offer the simplicity and ease of usage you’d want to carry your everyday operational work.
We offer three distinct products, all backed by the robust Go Evo platform.
Personal Protective App
Our simple to use, mobile-first application. Pick and choose the compliance solutions you need, forget the rest.
Ideal for: Small to medium organizations and businesses.
MESH
The fully-featured compliance, work order and asset management software is built with digitization in mind.
Ideal for: Municipalities and large corporations.
MESH Tracks
Mobile GPS fleet management platform helps you connect with drivers, no matter where they are.
Ideal for: Fleet-based businesses to manage, track and maintain vehicles.
Get in touch today and transform your organization’s health and safety compliance with our fully digital, secure, and easy-to-use digital compliance products today.