Workforce Digitalization: Integrating People, Processes, and Systems to Improve Safety Performance

Griffin Dewatering is a Houston, Texas-based dewatering and water treatment company founded in 1934 to provide services and equipment to the construction industry. The company, with offices in eight states across the United States, is a leader in groundwater control and dewatering, known for its engineering and technical expertise and groundwater handling solutions.

The construction industry is known for its safety hazards and risks. Griffin’s working environment included managing underground utilities, repairing dams and levees, remediating coal ash ponds, and dewatering high-rise buildings with underground parking garages, among others. Griffin wanted to ensure workplace safety for the workers and automate processes.

The company was using manual and paper-based health and safety systems, which was becoming unsustainable. It needed an automated and centralized system for safety management that would make it easy to monitor the progress of key safety initiatives. There was an urgent requirement to automate processes like equipment inspections, job safety analysis, and probabilistic safety assessments.

The company was already using Salesforce for CRM and project management. To automate its safety management system, Griffin implemented ComplianceQuest EHS, with integrated risk management capabilities. This enabled the company’s health and safety leaders to have a finger on the pulse of all key safety metrics, data, and information. It improved accountability, visibility, and transparency of safety performance across sites and locations.

The paper-based forms, folders, and checklists were replaced with a modern, fully automated, cloud-based solution that enabled workforce digitalization. It was able to integrate people, processes, and systems by accessing accurate data to identify risks and determine corrective actions. Till today, all their field superintendents continually log important information to provide the management with an accurate picture of safety risks, observations, and incidents – all easily accessible in just a few clicks.

ComplianceQuest also custom-designed field scheduling and training applications. Field employees can access their unique profiles and track their training and certifications along with company targets and benchmarks by location and position.

The company embarked on automating EHS in 2017 and by 2020, the incidence rates had declined to zero.

‘Connected Digitalization’ is Critical for Improved Workplace Safety

Workplace safety is crucial for a business from many points of view. It not only ensures the safety of the workers, both permanent and contract, but also increases worker loyalty, commitment, and participation. Integrating people, processes, and systems is essential to establish a culture of safety, which enables businesses to implement reactive, proactive, and preventative approaches. A safe workplace increases brand value and revenues and improves productivity while lowering the cost of safety.

We recently published a blog titled “Reducing Cost of Safety with a Next-Generation Safety Solution”. Read it here: https://www.compliancequest.com/blog/reduce-cost-of-safety/

For any EHS to be effective, it needs to integrate end-to-end processes, provide a single source of truth, and enable business leaders to make informed decisions. The cloud-based ComplianceQuest EHS solution takes a modular approach to workforce digitalization by integrating workflows with other enterprise systems such as ERP and CRM. This cost-effective, scalable, and robust solution ensures improved workforce engagement and productivity through an integrated approach to documenting, learning, and controlled change management. This provides greater visibility into processes and access to crucial data that can improve decision-making.

Having a next-generation EHS solution that seamlessly “connects” with other business systems including the ERP, CRM, PLM, etc. is critical to “build in safety” into everything a company does. That is the only way to become data-driven and collaborative when it comes to planning safety initiatives.

Improve Documentation, Training, and Change Management

Document management is an important aspect of safety management and mandatory for regulatory compliance. But, in a manual system, this can also be a challenge due to the time and costs involved, as seen in the case of Griffin.

By automating workflows, businesses can improve efficiency and access to reports and data quickly. Providing workers with tools to document observations, incidents, and even safe behaviors can improve visibility into processes, providing meaningful insights for continuous improvement.

The document life cycle from the time of creation to reviews, approvals, sharing, and collaboration becomes easier with a cloud-based solution such as CQ EHS. It empowers management teams and safety leaders with crucial information on risks and hazards that need to be addressed proactively to improve workplace safety. It helps assess skill gaps and deliver training content to upskill workers. It also enables change management in a safe manner by sharing information and preparing workers.

Automating document management also helps to enforce SOP compliance and integrates competency training and tracking to equip workers with the right skills to discharge their responsibilities responsibly and effectively.

Change is the only constant but also a highly risky business. Changes to processes, strategies, suppliers, raw materials, and so on are common. Further, there are external changes such as regulations, business environment, technology, government policies, etc. All these have an impact on the operations and procedures, which, in turn, impact safety.

For instance, changes to design need to be communicated to the workers at the manufacturing site and the suppliers if there is an impact on the specifications. Any deviation can prove risky for worker safety along with impacting product quality.

Documenting and sharing these with the relevant teams, implementing corresponding changes to the functions to meet the new needs, assessing risks and hazards, and implementing controls become important.

Employee involvement in change management plays a crucial role in effectively transforming processes without compromising workplace safety. Automation and integration help to make employees aware of the nature of the change, the need for it, and the impact on their processes and safety.

CQ enables workforce digitalization for improved safety by enabling a transformation with technology built to specifically control documents and optimize workforce skillsets and productivity. With our next-generation EHS solution, it becomes easier to –

• Have real-time visibility over the content and workforce processes
• Ensure access to the latest version of key documents, including regulatory filings
• Collaborate better and bring in total employee involvement to building a safe workplace
• Keeping the workforce upskilled with on-demand learning
• Being audit ready at all times
• Conduct safety inspections with the help of automation

ComplianceQuest’s cloud-based Environment, Health, and Safety Management software automates workflows across the enterprise and integrates them. It provides business leaders and managers with visibility into processes and access to relevant data needed to improve workplace safety.

ComplianceQuest enables Workforce Digitalization for improved safety by streamlining the following processes:

• Document creation, storage, and access
• Change management and information sharing
• Training to upskill employees and capabilities
• Audit to automate the audit process and improve workplace safety
• Incident reporting and management
• Safety Observations to prevent future events by identifying and preventing minor events
• Contractor safety
• Supplier management to minimize safety risks
• Risk management to prioritize and control critical ones
• Management Review for strategic decision-making around safety management
• Permit to Work to perform specialized and risky tasks

To know more, request a demo here: https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/ehs/