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How to be more proactive with safety

Andy Pritchard | December 18, 2023 | 5 min read

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Reacting to safety incidents when they occur is a great way to ensure they don't happen again. But how can we prevent incidents before they happen? Incident prevention can save your organization hundreds of thousands in direct and indirect costs, not to mention the time and energy required to investigate and deal with regulatory concerns.

Modern technology has enabled proactive safety methods, providing managers with the ability to recognize unsafe patterns, provide frontline staff with real-time risk assessment feedback, and react to issues more quickly to prevent disaster. So, what is involved in implementing a proactive (aka preventive safety) program at your facility? Let's dig in …

A bit about Weever.

Weever is cloud-based operations and productivity software that makes it easy to involve frontline staff in on-going improvement initiatives. With one site license and a highly intuitive interface everyone can participate. Use Weever to capture meaningful and rich data effortlessly from frontline staff, create schedules and provide real-time access to information so they can be more effective at their job. Create action plans from inspection failures and track improvements to completion and automate reporting so you can spend your time doing the "real work" instead of battling with spreadsheets.

Create a Business Case

Proactive Safety is a methodology that uses data captured from employees to recognize unsafe policies, behaviors and conditions, even if the event resulted in safe outcomes, and to create action plans, including training, signage, mitigation strategies, to prevent these issues from becoming incidents.

The Proactive Safety methodology can be a big undertaking requiring a budget and buy-in from senior management.

The best way to get anything to happen at a manufacturing facility is to get the buy-in from senior leadership. In order to do this, you need to create a business case that outlines some key details they need to understand before "green lighting" a project.

Project Goals
Scope of the project
Expected costs to implement and manage
Expected benefits and ROI

You will be more likely to succeed with your pitch if you get alignment and support from other department managers and frontline staff. You can talk to them about how you want to prevent incidents and the benefit you see, invite them to a meeting to discuss the plan and get them to endorse the project.

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Make your safety program more proactive today

A great way to get buy-in is to show senior leadership the ROI of a proactive safety approach without shelling out a big investment of time and money. To do this, consider trialing some simple projects.

There are some "quick wins" that you can do today to get the ball rolling on making your safety program more proactive. Behaviour-based safety observations, risk assessments and monthly safety quizzes are examples of easy ways to elevate safety awareness and capture data from frontline employees. Learn more about these "quick wins" here: https://weeverapps.com/proactive-safety/be-more-proactive-with-safety/

Make sure you take account of some key performance indicators before you start your trial so you can compare with your results after 3 months or so. Number of incidents and near misses are a good thing to track. You can also track number of proactive safety data points before and after and number of preventive measures created during the trial.

If you are interested in creating a project plan, you can download this guide that takes you through each step, including goals, implementation plans, costs and ROI.

Feel free to learn more about our software and get in touch with us if you have any questions.