A New Approach to Industrial Safety
Safety in the workplace continues to remain crucial. Modern assets in factories can be highly valuable and expensive. Incidents caused by human error or other workplace hazards can lead to the destruction of such equipment, which would be a huge blow to any company.
The safety of employees also remains crucial. Employees have to feel safe if they are to be productive and remain focused on their work. In addition, employee accidents can cost a company a lot in terms of lost labor and medical costs.
Moreover, government regulations on safety have to be adhered to. Without this, companies are prohibited from operating. Winning huge tenders can also sometimes be dependent on whether a company implements best practices in safety.
Considering all the factors above, companies are highly motivated to ensure safety in the workplace. Even so, safety has remained a challenge.
As a result, it has become necessary to rethink the conventional approach to safety in a bid to be more effective and use the resources dedicated to safety more efficiently.
The Old Approach to Safety No Longer Has a Place in the Modern Industrial Setup
The old approach to safety has been fundamentally flawed in that, for one, it has been safety-first-worker-second. In addition, safety procedures have been rigid.
When thinking about workplace safety, safety officers have often implemented safety procedures and structures as if there were no other factors in the equation. As a result, when workers were eventually brought into the safety program, they were required to make significant changes to their natural way of doing things.
This was effectively setting up safety programs for failure. As a result, workers were accused of negligence and of not taking safety seriously. Accidents were readily attributed to human error and carelessness.
In addition, the old approach consisted of rigid safety procedures yet no emergency is ever the same as another. For example, in factories, a common reaction to the fire alarm was to find the nearest exit and assemble at designated points to wait for further instruction.
Such rigidity and the failure to build safety systems around workers no longer has a place in modern industries, where safety requirements have become more demanding. With the never-ending adoption of ever-changing technology, it is necessary to rethink our approach to safety.
The use of human and organizational performance software is necessary if safety systems are to be built around workers. In addition, the adoption of industrial dynamic safety routines is crucial to enhance a company’s capability to deal with varying emergency situations. And the adoption of AI safety 4.0 platform technology will help leverage artificial intelligence to achieve behavioral and predictive analysis in a fresh approach to industrial safety.
Safety Powered by the Connected Worker Platform
For human and organizational performance software to be successful, it has to have a reliable source of constant data. Such data can then be analyzed to determine how humans naturally behave in the workplace. The insights acquired in this manner come in handy while implementing safety systems that are designed around workers.
A connected worker platform is a great source of data. Not only does it enable sensor data to be automatically collected but it also enables workers to actively participate in the whole safety process. Apart from giving their feedback on safety, they can document what they learn. Such knowledge can then be effectively disseminated throughout a company.
The connected worker platform also enables the implementation of industrial dynamic safety routines, as it makes real-time communication during emergencies a reality.
In addition, it provides data for the AI safety 4.0 platform, helping fuel analysis into the behavior of workers, in addition to facilitating predictive analysis which helps take proactive action to prevent hazards from being actualized.