Unlocking Safety Insights: Key Questions to Maximize Data Value

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tuesday Safety Talks, a mini webinar series where you can learn how to improve your safety culture. This first talk is on the benefits of evaluating your safety data with Cameron Schwartz. With that, I’d like to introduce Cameron. Cameron comes from the background of being a safety manager at a manufacturing organization and has implemented EHS software, Origami. He also benefits from speaking with a wide variety of clients and prospects on their safety challenges. To Cameron. Thanks, Emily. Today, I’d like to use this theme of using the past to allow ourselves to kind of lead down a series of questions to think about your operations, how you evaluate your data, and where there may be some opportunities for improvement in the future. I think at the core of it, that’s where we want to be as safety professionals, always getting better and improving. I found this quote interesting that those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This was actually said back in nineteen forty eight in a speech to the British House of Commons by none other than Winston Churchill. As I reflect on this statement, I can’t help but allow my mind to connect this to safety and risk within business operations. And let’s reword this just a little bit to better tie it to today’s session. Companies that fail to learn from past events and make changes are likely to experience them again in the future. With this safety narrative, past events have a direct correlation with people being hurt, property being damaged, and ultimately revenue being lost. Depending on the severity of the events, this can lead to higher costs in insurance premiums, negative publicity, and potentially loss of revenue. I’d like to share this photo with you. It’s a terrible representation, but maybe in my mind a little bit accurate. When I started as a safety manager with a prior company that I was working with, I wanted to quickly get up to speed with their safety data. These are some of the questions that I had running through my mind. What was the company’s annual injury rate? What departments within the business had experienced the most injuries? And finally, were there any identified root causes that proved to be a challenge time and time again? Ultimately, the goal was this: Where can I make an impact to keep people going home at night to their families? We want employees to come in and go home with the same, you know, no injuries, you know, go home the same way you came to work in the morning, maybe even a little bit better, I think is the ultimate goal. So shortly after I had started my position, I had asked the HR manager, who was my boss, about gaining access to all of our incident records and reports. And very quickly, I was granted access. And so I was led to a file storage room. And within that room, was all of the filing cabinets and storage, and they’re all in here is what I was told. Now, while this photo is an obvious exaggeration of my experience, it is representation of how I perceived it. The organizational system of filing had changed over the years as leadership had changed. Some records had been filed by employee name, others were filed by year, especially when it was dealing with recordable incidents, and then even more records were stored by department. Those were those were the records that were actually in file folders and not didn’t account for the stack of incident reports that had not been filed at all and was stacked on top of the filing cabinets. Now, there’s a longer story here about three safety coordinators that reported to me that kind of hated me for a little bit because we took that task of getting all of the data from the incidents into a spreadsheet so we could start making sense of where we were and where we needed to go to. The short story is that my team spent about the next three months getting this data into a digital format, and I’m so glad that we did. The reason I share this story with you is because there are other safety professionals out there that are struggling with how to get their arms around their information. So that being said, feel free to reach out. There are safety and risk professionals here at Origami Risk that have that have been in your shoes and can help you develop a path forward with best practices along the way. This manual process of what I did, a spreadsheet and bringing in all this data, was actually directly correlated in the future uploaded into Origami, where we can talk more about that in the future about the data insights I was able to capture by those manual processes. So, if you’re thinking about your data, you’re thinking about all of the incidents that have happened, I want to start posing some questions to you. And the goal is that these questions challenge you and your internal processes to open up to areas of improvement of how your business thinks about historical data. So, starting off, how many preventable incidents did your company have last year? Now, just to give some additional information, some of these questions are loaded on how you reflect your data or other best practices that we might talk about as well. This question is a great example of both. So, does your company have an incident review process to determine if an incident was preventable or not? Without that process in place, you can’t answer how many preventable incidents did your company have last year. So how easily right now, if you think about your business, how easily can you review and report on these metrics? Question number two, how much did preventable incidents cost your organization? So, as we continue down this path and we ask about preventable incidents and what was the impact to your business, if you were able to quickly take that sum of losses associated with preventable incidents and apply them to a leading safety program tied to training or an employee and employee engagement campaign, what would that do for your employee morale or the business in general? Would you see reduced incident rates? Would you see more reporting because you see your employees and your safety culture improve to where they see that you’re taking action on things that are reported or things that have happened? Just kind of want to open these questions up for you to think about your processes. So, question. You now know your preventable incidents and how much they cost you. What were your top root causes? So, if you have an investigation process in place and getting to the root cause, what were those top root causes last year versus this year? And just to take and talk a little bit from a data strategy as well, How are you storing your root cause information? And this kind of goes a little bit more into the thought process of having a database to manage your safety program. Is the root cause a text field with a narrative response, meaning it’s it’s free flow text. Whoever is doing the analysis can enter in any information that they want. Or do you have it in a coded format, meaning it’s in a drop down? So that way you can drive that selection to an end result of how does that categorically fit within your data. And if we drive an end result to what we call a coded field, this will greatly help trending and analysis in the future with reports. Because now I can show the top selected root causes and they all line up that I don’t have to worry about something being misspelled or a different word being used that throws off or skews my data. Now we’re really driving those incidents into kind of categorized buckets. And I want to take a moment here just to kind of once again share a best practice here. These are what I would consider root cause categories tied on the six ms’s, where we’re looking at manned method, machine materials, mother nature or environment, and then management. And this is just a kind of initial listing, but just ideas of ways to think about your data. As we look at these categories, we’re able to drive an end user into a selection of what that top issue was. And by doing this, this leads to better metrics and trending to be able to show information on a dashboard or within a report to where you can streamline your data and be able to see better pictures of what’s going on with your organization. Now, have prospects and clients that have shared some struggles that they’ve had with doing this. You know, Cameron, we don’t always have the ability to select something that’s there. And that’s okay. So within the system that you’re using now, whether it’s a manual process, whether you’re using Excel or another platform or Origami, having the ability to identify these as selected dropdowns, but then maybe also having an other option available that we can then put in a text based field that as you as safety leadership review all of the incidents that somebody selected other and put in a random text for that for that root cause. That’s a great opportunity to review all of those submissions at the end of the year. And maybe maybe you adjust this list. Maybe you come in and you add some other options for next year’s data. So, those are just some things to think about from a best practices perspective. So, let’s circle back again. We’ve looked at how many preventable incidents your company had last year. You know the cost of the organization, what your top root causes were. And so now my question is, what are you doing with your corrective actions and do you have visibility into them? Your business has invested the time and the energy to track incidents and investigate them when applicable, identify the root causes of an issue. Logically, you should come to the point where something needs to be done to prevent this incident from happening again in the future. A typical safety program will identify corrective actions. If you are identifying corrective actions, do you have a system that also supports action assignment reminders, escalations, and tracking them in a standardized way? Do you have the capability of tracking additional details that are important to your business that are tied to the corrective actions? A couple of examples of this might be how much billable time was spent to resolve the issue or what was the cost of that corrective action? Other items like that, we have the capability within our platform to be able to update the actions so that way you can pull out those deliverables and metrics along the way. This is really an area where Origami Risk excels with our platform. As a safety professional, I’ve experienced the frustration of trying to track and follow-up on corrective actions manually through verbal reminders and using email to follow-up with action owners. If you are struggling with closing the loop on your action items, please reach out. We can show you a better way to manage this process. The final question I have for you today is, does your leadership have visibility into your safety program? At the end of the day, we need systems that work for us and reduce time. One of the ways that we do this is by giving authority to the information for those that are managing those areas or those locations or those geographical areas as well. We have to give ownership to the processes and the results within their organizational units. Can your leadership, the way that you have your system set up now or the way that you’re managing safety, can they quickly drill into information and follow-up with their authority to get things done? I think that’s a question that if we can ask that. With Origami, you’re given the capability to be able to track everything we’ve talked about with the incidents and the corrective actions and what’s going on this year versus last year or the financial impact to safety for an individual department or location or or region. Your leadership has the capability to be able to do all of that within our platform. And if your system now doesn’t enable that kind of functionality without a lot of manual manipulation or people that have to generate reports on the fly, then I think you’re missing out. Origami gives the ability to put this data at your leadership’s fingertips in real time. And this gives them the ability to drill into their processes, identify opportunities for improvement, and effect change. If anything I shared today resonates with you, please reach out and let me know. We’re here to help businesses improve their automated workflows and reduce their technical overhead all along the way. If you follow the QR code here on the side, you can go to our website and learn more about Origami’s EHS programs. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Cameron, for that really helpful presentation. At this point, we’re going to move into the Q and A segment of our presentation. So you’re welcome to ask any questions in the Q and A panel at the bottom of your screen. And we will be taking questions at this time. So the we did get a question in. One question that came up was if you were just starting to capture your safety data for an organization, where would you start? Cameron, would you like to address that question? Yeah, I think if I was just kind of starting out again, I’d want to gather as much information and details as possible about historical information. And we kind of covered that earlier in the session. But then also thinking about how I can enable reporting of just your general population of employees to be able to get further information into your company, whether it’s incident related as far as a lagging indicator, or if you can enable near misses or unsafe conditions or unsafe acts to also be reported, That’s hugely important for businesses. The other thing that I think about, too, is how are you communicating back to the employees that are reporting information to you? That’s a great way to drive culture that you’re closing that loop, you’re circling back with them, you’re communicating, you’re giving them updates about the incidents they’ve submitted in the past that will lead to further communication and reporting in the future. Great. Thanks, Cameron. It looks like we have a couple more questions. The next question is, what metrics have you used to promote safety? Some of the metrics that’s been helpful for me in the past is typically something that a supervisor or manager might come to me and ask about. I can think of a time where I had a manager come and say, hey, I’m looking to do something in my department. I need to know the injuries we’ve had in the past. Quickly being able to report back to them all of the incidents directly tied to their departments, the body parts that were injured, the type of injury, if it was a muscle strain or sprain or a laceration, something along those lines, and then also the cost of the injury. And by giving those details back to leadership, it gives them the capabilities to say, this is what our losses were in the past, and maybe here’s some engineering controls or some further training that we want to bring to try to reduce that incident rate in the future. Those things can be helpful for management or leadership to be able to justify some of the spend for improving safety programs. Great. That’s helpful. Another question that came in is how do you address or encourage reporting from the company when there is sometimes a hesitancy to do so? Oh, man, what a great question. That’s just a straight safety culture question right there. In order to change a culture, it really requires somebody to lead that change and to let people know that you don’t have a punitive system to where somebody reports and then somebody gets in trouble. You’re really your goal is to kind of turn that around and make it to a point where you’re able to be appreciative of those reports that are coming in and finding ways to be able to improve or enhance what’s been reported. If if you have employees that whenever they bring up a safety concern, you know, there’s there’s a negative relationship to what was reported, that can be really difficult to get around. So making sure your managers and your leadership are really utilizing kind of a servant leadership approach to handling safety. And then once again, that communication piece, getting back with the person that reported it, thanking them, and then showing them the of the forward momentum or the progress that happens along the way from the report. Really valuable. Yeah, I actually would like to echo that we’ve heard from some of our clients that they go around and do some trainings where they go on-site and work with managers and let them know that they’re not punished for any sort of incident reporting and that actually it’s just helpful in driving transparency and addressing causes as opposed to, you know, being punished for reporting those incidents. So that definitely resonates with what you were saying. Great, well, I think at this time we have no further questions, So thank you so much for your time. And you can tune in next week at the same or sorry, not next week, in two weeks from now at the same time for our next Tuesday Safety Talk. Have a great rest of your day.