As someone who has come from several manufacturing environments, in various industries, I’ve always viewed the ‘injury-free workplace’ as something that is a continuous journey with the right kind of controls in place.
The key idea is that the most effective path involves foreseeing workplace injuries before they happen.
This is possible only if organizations do not consider achieving zero incident goal at the workplace as a number to reach. Instead, they should see it as an ongoing effort to identify safety incidents and leverage employee well-being. This means they need to commit to improving their safety performance and be open to learning from mistakes and failures to keep improving safety methods.
Is it possible to create an injury-free workplace?
Most people in the EHS industry hear the term “injury-free workplace” and imagine one of two scenarios:
- An entirely automated workplace safety system that doesn't require people, designed to keep employees out of the picture.
- A workplace where detailed procedures tightly control everything.
The lagging indicators that most safety teams use are heavily biased, and qualitative in nature. Take companies' Behavioral Based Safety Programs, for instance. It only records reported incidents, which are often subjective and incomplete. Surprisingly, this data still shapes company safety plans, funding decisions, and future strategies. How can an organization strategically plan and allocate necessary resources without the information needed to make the right decisions?
The implementation of conventional safety methods and practices has helped to mitigate these pitfalls, but they have their limits in advancing the industry. Standardizing work procedures, incentive programs, and risk management has taken us close to zero injuries, but we are seeing a plateau.
The industry is now looking at ways to engage by redeploying safety culture and behavioral programs. Instead, what if we shift our focus to obtaining leading indicator data that will equip an organization with the information needed to help prevent an injury, without compromising worker’s privacy?
To fully realize the notion of “injury free,” organizations need something novel. Something different. Something that can truly complete the journey and predict an injury before it occurs. The answer: Artificial Intelligence that can see the previously unseen.
Real-time leading safety indicators by AI
Safety teams often measure effectiveness by a competency test, but imagine you train your workforce with 100% passing ergonomic lifting training. If your dashboard shows that employees are using the correct lifting technique only 60% of the time the next week, would you see that safety training as effective? There needs to be more, and intenseye is exactly that. It’s that extra measure that humans can’t achieve alone.
As safety teams work towards achieving a zero-incident goal, it can inspire them to aim for the highest safety standards. However, it's important not to evaluate the success of safety teams solely based on reaching this goal. Instead, the focus should be on creating psychological safety to identify potential risks and take corrective actions.
The zero-incident goal should center on ensuring the safety of all frontline team members every day. By embracing this path of continuous improvement in workplace safety, we can establish a healthier and safer work environment for everyone!
4 steps to create a Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) Prevention program
A successful SIF prevention program requires a proactive, data-driven approach that goes beyond traditional safety methods. Follow these four streamlined steps to build an effective SIF prevention strategy that leverages real-time insights and empowers your team to act before incidents occur.
Step 1: Identify SIF potential in near misses
Focus on near misses and minor incidents as indicators of potential serious injuries or fatalities. Use Intenseye’s AI to track these events continuously, identifying safety patterns or risks that might otherwise go unnoticed, allowing you to prioritize preventative actions.
Step 2: Employ detailed safety view with Safety Score card
The Safety Score card centralizes data by categorizing risks according to specific workplace hazards and locations. This helps safety teams prioritize interventions where they are needed most by clearly identifying areas with elevated SIF potential, such as confined spaces or electrical zones.
Intenseye’s Safety Score provides a live view of safety performance, enabling teams to focus resources on areas with high SIF potential and significantly reduce risks.
Step 3: Detect and mitigate SIF precursors with leading indicators
Recognize high-risk conditions early, such as missing personal protective equipment (PPE) or improper procedures. Intenseye’s real-time leading indicators help address these risks immediately, providing actionable insights to mitigate safety hazards.
Step 4: Empower the workforce with safety awareness
Train employees to recognize and report hazards backed with Intenseye’s visualizing capabilities, to create a proactive safety culture that actively reduces SIF risks across the organization. The heatmaps use colors to indicate the frequency of safety risks in different facility areas which make your training way more productive.
Following the safety pattern with Intenseye's safety AI
Human beings like to believe that we are unpredictable in nature, but human behavior is more akin to following patterns.
All injuries in the workplace have leading indicators that can highlight the likelihood of an injury. Current programs in place cannot fully track this data – human oversight has limitations in near-miss reporting and behavioral-based safety observation programs.
Intenseye's AI-powered workplace safety management software applies computer vision, in addition to what is already being done, to help see and track leading indicators that the human eye misses.
You can see a safety incident in real time, but you cannot see patterns occurring with once-a-day reporting. When companies integrate Intenseye’s AI into their facilities, it then becomes possible to give safety teams access to 24/7 unbiased quantitative data to see what is previously unseen in reaching an injury-free workplace. Schedule a demo with us to learn more!
