5 Best Practices for Reducing Worker Safety Illnesses and Injuries

The global health and safety picture

Through the COVID crisis, business leaders have been managing operations as best as they can, seeking to ensure business continuity while keeping staff safe, healthy, and motivated.

Often overlooked in this calculus, however, is the role of non-pandemic injuries and illnesses – the traditional bailiwick of safety programs. Pre-pandemic estimates of workplace deaths were around 2.78 million per year, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO)ⁱ. Prior to the pandemic, these numbers had been steadily rising.

The biggest share of work-related mortality came from work-related diseases. Fatal occupational accidents remained a serious issue, too, taking an estimated 1,000 lives a dayⁱⁱ.

Initial COVID lockdowns stemmed the rising tide of workplace injuries (specifically). But now injuries are on the upswing again, according to BLS data.

In turn, the cost of passive safety responses will only increase. That puts the onus firmly on senior leadership to go above and beyond to ensure safety and wellbeing in the workplace.

What can senior leaders and their safety deputies do in such a fluid safety climate? It won’t be easy.

To help, we’ve culled together the relevant research, laying out five best practices for reducing worker safety illnesses and injuries and generally improving the quality of safety programs.

Introducing five safety management best practices

1. Don’t ignore safety reporting

For experienced safety leaders, gathering an accurate safety risk picture is a no brainer. There’s long been a perennial challenge to doing so, though. And that challenge has come in the form of safety underreporting.

How bad is the issue? Nearly a quarter of organisations underreport safety incidents, according to survey dataⁱⁱⁱ. Even the ILO has called out the practice at a national level.

At the individual company level, the problem is even worse. A reported 50 per cent of workers reported experiencing at least one incident; meanwhile, thirty per cent of workers failed to report at least one incident^v.

And it turns out that everyone in the organisation underreports – safety deputies, field workers, managers, even senior leaders. 

On a per-person basis, senior business leaders actually underreport nearly twice as many incidents as their frontline subordinates^vi.

What can be done?

According to the research, organisations that pursue safety compliance strategies log higher rates of safety reporting than those that don’t. Senior leaders, as such, must get serious about developing proactive safety cultures, then communicating the tenets of those cultures to workers.

One of the tenets should be that incident and near-miss reporting is fundamental to fulfilling the mission of the Safety program and the company writ large. Instilling the message will require leaders to reinforce the benefits of the safety culture across the organisation. 

Some of the benefits include:

• Fewer critical safety incidents and less damage to facilities and equipment
• Lower rates of injury and illness
• Reduced costs
• Improved productivity and higher employee engagement

What’s more, reinforcing the importance of reporting through rigorous trainings and site-specific inductions will also make a crucial difference. Sure, many jurisdictions mandate training as part of a worker’s induction; the quality of those trainings, however, vary widely. 

Then, there’s improving reporting functionality. Workers often decry not having the ability to report incidents, hazards, and observations when they’re in the field. Instead, they are forced to wait until they’re back in the office, by which time they might have forgotten key details of the incident in question.

The best-practice solution, here, is to procure mobile accessible, integrated risk and safety management software that gives workers easy-to-use, responsive incident reporting capabilities in the field.

Those reporting capabilities must be robust. Workers should be able to capture a whole range of event report types, including safety, environmental, near misses, injuries, security, compliance, complaints, suggestions, etc. 

2. Continue COVID risk mitigation efforts

Gathering an accurate safety picture is important. However, the global public health picture remains shaky.

As of recently, epidemiologists have hinted that the Omicron lull might be over. As such, continuing COVID safety risk mitigation efforts is prudent. Which takes us to best-practice, international standard ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 45005.

What is it? A single set of multi-purpose guidelines, ISO 45005 provides reasonable measures and practical recommendations to manage ongoing COVID risk in the workplace. 

Indeed, it is a focus on risk planning and assessment that enables the standard to apply so broadly, making it highly relevant for safety leaders crafting best-practice strategies in an evolving health and safety risk environment.

To this end, relevant sections encourage organisations (1) to track the external and internal issues likeliest to affect the health and safety of workers and (2) to consider how those issues could have been impacted by the pandemic.

The issues in question include the following:

Of course, it is not always possible or practical for organisations to eliminate all risks related to COVID, even with high levels of immunisation. To this end, the best practice guidance is to prioritise identified risks, while accounting for the following factors:

• Practical changes that should be made to how work is organised and where work takes place
• Interaction between workers
• Interaction between workers and other people, including visitors, customers, and members of the public
• How to maintain complete and accurate contact information on people who interact closely for the purpose of contact tracing, respecting the need for confidentiality
• The safe use of common areas and shared equipment
• The impact of the pandemic on psychological health and wellbeing (More below)

Employers maintain a duty of care obligation to employees working at home, as well. Indeed, this kind of work arrangement has been deemed the safer work option. Which is why it is often advisable to keep workers at home to manage the health and safety risks related to the pandemic.

Other factors might militate against that guidance, such as productivity, collaboration, and engagement concerns. Organisations, as such, will need to be strategic in determining who works from home. 

The best-practice, here, is to poll workers, inquiring the following:

• Can you effectively perform your role from home?
• Is your home situation suitable for home working?
• Do you want to return to a physical workplace?
• Are you confident that you can travel safely to and from a physical workplace without significant exposure to COVID-19?

Beyond that, not everyone can work from home – not all roles, responsibilities, and sectors are remote-work compatible. Determining who can work remote requires planning. And so, best-practice actions to take include:

• Determine which roles are critical for operational continuity, safe facility management, or regulatory requirements and cannot be performed from home
• Identify workers in critical roles who are unable to work from home due to home circumstances or the unavailability of specialist equipment
• Determine the minimum number of workers needed in a physical workplace at any one time to operate safely and effectively
• Determine how activities are organised (e.g., reducing job rotation, requiring workers to perform one activity with one set of equipment throughout the shift, enabling flexible working hours)

3. Proactively engage with lone workers

Such hybrid and remote work models have increased the number of lone workers. But keeping those high-risk workers safe entails creating specialised safety regimes for lone workers.

How, exactly? For starters, lone-worker risk mitigation strategies should be part of (not distinct from) the larger work health and safety risk mitigation strategy of the organisation.

If that’s not already the case, here are the crucial steps to take:

• Assess the lone-worker risk. One of the objectives of the risk assessment will be to fully consider the factors intrinsic to the kind of lone work executed. To do so, safety leaders must ask some of the following questions to adequately gauge risk^vii: 
• What kind of lone work is being done? It’s not enough to know that lone work is taking place. Risk managers need to know the precise nature of the lone work that’s being done. Cleaning an office at night carries far different risk than work with heavy machines, at heights, with hazardous substances, or (even) simply in a hazardous plant.
  
  Simply knowing whether high-risk activity is involved in lone work isn’t enough, either. WHS professionals and risk teams need to dig deeper. Risk is always dynamic. At first glance, driving might not seem like a high-risk activity, but factor in long hours and the potential for violence and aggression on the road, and risk increases. The same goes for (extreme) environmental conditions. 
• Where is the lone work taking place? Isolated work often takes place at a significant geographical remove from emergency response and rescue services. 
• When is the lone work being done? Statistically, remote and isolated work at night typically increases the risk of exposure to violence. 
• How long will the lone work take? Similarly, the safety risk to a lone worker might increase as time (on the job) increases. 
• Who are your lone workers? Remote and isolated work is often specialised work, calling for a specialised skill set. Both the business unit assigning the work and the team controlling for work-related risk should know the lone worker’s level of experience and training. HR should be brought into the loop as well if there’s a preexisting medical condition that can increase risk. 
• What means of communication do you have with your lone workers? Safety risk teams must ascertain what kind of communications the lone worker will have (with base operations). Will a team in a fixed setting remain in regular contact with the lone worker? Further, is the remote and isolated work taking place in a location where available communications might be impaired?^viii
  • Control the lone-worker risk. Once identified and assessed, risk will have to be controlled. The relevant control mechanisms will vary by case. However, they are likely to entail the following:
• Worker consultation and involvement in the consideration of potential risks and in the development of measures to control them
• Taking affirmative steps to remove risks (where possible), or implementing control measures
• A degree of specialised instruction, training, and supervision
• Periodic review of the risk assessment as well as subsequent reviews after significant changes in working practice

These control measures, however, only provide a floor, not a best-practice ceiling, for acceptable behaviour. Organisations must still implement their own best-practice controls.

To that end, organisations should implement suitable training protocols for lone workers. The training will focus on concrete, practical strategies to remain safe in specific lone-work settings.

Beyond induction, business teams should only recruit capable employees for remote and isolated work. For instance, professionals already accustomed to performing lone work are more likely to bring valuable experience and expertise to the risk mitigation consultation, development, and engagement processes. In turn, that experience and expertise can improve the process for future lone workers.

Remote or isolated environments also need to be made as safe as possible for lone workers, which means that business and risk teams must perform due diligence on the setting that the worker is entering and relay those findings to the lone worker.

Additionally, senior leadership must also allay some of the organisational and social isolation that accompanies lone work, communicating their commitment to the lone worker’s health and safety. 

4. Manage and respond to psychosocial threats

Traditionally, lone work was most associated with elevated risk of work disengagement. Now, the pandemic has come along, taking a severe toll on the psychological health of most workers, and turbocharging what was already a significant mental health and wellbeing crisis.

Organisations, for their part, must step in to keep their workers psychologically healthy. What can they do?

Best-practice standard, ISO 45003 should help organisations prevent work-related injury and ill health (whether of employees, customers, or other stakeholders) and promote wellbeing in the workplace. The standard provides guidelines for managing psychosocial risk within an occupational health and safety system based on ISO 45001. 

How does it work? Well, just like with ISO 45005, getting planning right is key. Indeed, planning helps organisations establish appropriate objectives, determine how to achieve those objectives, and demonstrate the necessary commitment to continual improvement.

The exact nature of the planning process, however, depends on each organisation’s risk profile, the evaluation of which comes out of hazard identification processes. These are processes where organisations uncover underlying sources of harm as well as establish, implement, and maintain processes for hazard identification that are ongoing and proactive. 

During these processes, organisations will need to consider the following:

• The needs and expectations of specific groups of workers
• The needs of specific workplaces or sets of operations or work tasks
• The results of the assessment of psychosocial risks
• The implementation of actions designed to eliminate psychosocial hazards and reduce the associated risks
• The evaluation of those actions and their outcomes
• The management of the process by reviewing and updating it to meet changing needs, recognising good practice
• Necessary resources
• How to actively involve workers through consultation and participation

Although the resultant plans are a must have, dedicated resources will also be needed to help organisations reach objectives. Organisations will therefore have to allocate resources with the following criteria in mind: 

5. Invest in the right integrated safety and wellbeing platform

With the health and safety risk picture what it is, organisations can’t afford to belabour the implementation of best-practice solutions.

Fortunately, digital technologies can help businesses, with functionality tailored to complying expeditiously with ISO 45001 and ISO 45003 (as well as related standards, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001).

Beyond that, dedicated wellbeing management functionality within these platforms can help organisations (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, as well as (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement. 

What capabilities in particular? Organisations will:

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting on personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
• Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice 
• Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice
• Triage response to events
• Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
• Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
• Customise initiatives based on current events or unique organisational requirements
• Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
• Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
• Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content
• Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from your HR Software

In addition to wellbeing management, systems should also be able to perform the other relevant tasks cited above, to decrease rates of workplace injuries and illnesses. Necessary capabilities, here, include:

• Incident management. Comprehensive incident management tools should help effectively report and manage all environmental, health, and safety incidents.
• Injury management. Built-in communication and collaboration features should ensure quick responses when an injury occurs. The relevant system should also automatically share important documentation, questionnaires, and guidelines with personnel so that return to work coordinators can focus on supporting the injured worker. This will reduce insurance premiums by decreasing the amount of money spent returning personnel to work.
• Online inductions. The system should serve to streamline your induction process by enabling inductions to be completed online on any device. This will enable organisations to track the status all inductions in one location across multiple sites in real time.
• Reporting and analytics. The system should also empower data-driven work safety decisions across the organisation using real-time analytics. It should also generate safety reports ad hoc or regularly and export to external stakeholders.

Conclusion

Finally, the relaxation of COVID-related NPIs (nonpharmaceutical interventions) workplace injuries are once again on the upswing. Employers, worried about simply keeping the lights on the last few years, simply can’t afford to wait to address workplace injuries and illnesses.

Safety teams must do their part, as well, implementing best-practice measures across numerous risk areas in the organisation. Since the risks themselves tend to be interrelated, those same teams should also consider investing in integrated work health and safety software, like Noggin for Safety Management.

Built in line with industry standards, these solutions reinforce safety best practices, automating the Plan, Do, Check, Act management cycle. The result? Your team gets all the tools and information needed to empower personnel to make better decisions, driving the Safety program forward.

Sources

i. Päivi Hämäläinen et al., WSH Institute, Global Estimates of Occupational Accidents and Work-related Illnesses 2017. Available at

ii. http://www.icohweb.org/site/images/news/pdf/Report%20Global%20Estimates%20of%20Occupational%20Accidents%20and%20Work-related%20Illnesses%202017%20rev1.pdf.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safety-incident-reporting/.

v. International Labour Organization, International Labour Office: Improvement of national reporting, data collection and analysis of occupational accidents and diseases. Available at https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---safework/documents/publication/wcms_207414.pdf.

vi. Sentis: Underreporting of Safety Incidents in the Workplace: Recommendations for Improved Safety Outcomes. Available at https://www.sentis.com.au/workplace-safety-incident-reporting/.

vii. Ibid.

viii. Safe Work Australia: Managing the work environment and facilities: Code of Practice. Available at https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/1809/code_of_practice_-_managing_the_work_environment_and_facilities.pdf.

ix. Ibid.