With 2023 upon us, you’re probably defining your business’s challenges and goals for the new year. Needless to say workplace safety should feature as an elemental part, if not a priority. And with new technologies revealing many interesting safety applications, why not seize the moment to make some essential changes towards a safer 2023?
More than likely you have got your safety-basics covered. Still, you’re aware you can always do better. Or at least continuously aspire to do so. One of the most effective ways to offer your workers a safer 2023 is to invest in modern safety solutions. Often the results of technological pioneering, these solutions display attractive, versatile and sometimes surprising benefits.
A lot of these new, technology driven safety solutions ‘merely’ improve or upgrade the safety basics you currently have in place. This is nothing to make slight of, since they generally do so with substantial, if not drastic positive results. Other solutions offer completely new insights, features and capabilities, you’ll definitely want to add to your safety strategies.
Safety training 4.0
A proven ingredient of every safety system is worker training. Such as how to do the job, how to properly use equipment, how to recognize and avoid hazards, and how to respond to emergency situations. It’s also important to regularly review and update this training.
New technologies can significantly assist in a variety of training scenarios. Think about 3D-, AR- and VR-simulations to get ‘hands-on experience’ with new equipment, or for dealing with high-risk situations. Furthermore new monitoring and tracking solutions for vehicle drivers have the added – and proven – benefit to greatly improve training with real-time feedback, individually customized coaching and objective unbiased data.
Lone Worker Support
Your responsibilities as a manager of lone workers can be summed up as providing training, supervision, monitoring and support. Whether this training entails the necessary skills for the job, or lone worker specific skills (identifying and handling risks, knowing when to seek advice or assistance) we can point to the benefits of technology-driven teaching methods as described in the paragraph above.
When it comes to supervision, monitoring and support, new safety technologies allow for significant improvements in lone worker safety. Solutions today can automatically detect when the lone worker trips, falls, receives a shock or no longer moves. They allow for smart check ins, real-time location tracking, indoor and outdoor. They also support faster, more efficient and possibly lifesaving emergency procedures.
Man vs Vehicle
Statistics may show a gradual improvement, but ‘caught-between’ and ‘struck-by’ still remain two of OSHA’s ‘Fatal Four’ leading causes of workplace injuries and fatalities. These incidents occur mostly because of blind spots for operators or drivers. Other times on foot workers were not to hear alarms; pedestrians did not notice a moving vehicle behind them or drivers wrongly assumed the area was clear.
This is where safety solutions like proximity monitoring can make a difference. Actually they already do so on a growing number of work sites. This technology can be tailor made to tackle all the above mentioned causes for man-vehicle incidents and accidents. It’s generally acknowledged as the next step in preventing vehicle-vehicle, vehicle-stationary object and vehicle-pedestrian incidents and accidents.
New safety technologies for new insights
Ever faster, wireless communication allows for real-time and continuous data collection. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in machine learning and smart analysis-protocols can help transform these large amounts of data into actionable information. On more than one occasion this treasure trove of previously untapped data has revealed valuable insights.
Imagine a way to register each and every one of the often underreported near miss incidents. Picture a clear overview of every high traffic density and therefore high-risk location on the whole of your site. Envision knowing which drivers specifically are in need of what kind of extra safety coaching. Real-time analyses provide a multitude of new insights, at the click of a button. With this in place, predictive and prescriptive analytics are just one step away.
In conclusion, making your work site safer in 2023 – and beyond – requires a combination of proven methods and tools, upgraded and improved by opening them up to the benefits introduced by new safety technologies.
