There are no two ways about it - 2020 has changed the way businesses operate across the board, whether that’s the ways in which they interact with customers and end-users or how they relate to their employees.
Health and safety
While the remote working practices of office workers has been discussed at length in the mainstream throughout the year, other industries have had less of a spotlight shone on them. It’s one thing when work can be done from the kitchen table, but what about those industries that require workers to be on-site in order to fulfil their duties?
Health and safety is one area that has had to become a real focus as we’ve seen the pandemic unfold. Previously looked at as something that has to be done, leaders are now seeing the task of protecting their workers as one of the biggest priorities moving forward.
This is especially true for industries like construction and manufacturing, which frequently come up against potentially hazardous situations like employees working alone or operating heavy machinery without the appropriate training and PPE.
Even without Covid-19 as a factor, the challenges of workplace safety are wide and varied.
Thrust into the future
Of course, much of the technology has been ready for some time, but 2020 has forced a lot of organisations who were previously reluctant to adopt more modern ways of doing things to drastically reconsider their stance.
Collaborative working tools and video conferencing are the most obvious and visible, but technology has also begun to infiltrate some of the most fundamental areas of business.
Gone are the days of paper-based health and safety checks, for example, where essential processes like risk assessments have been conducted purely via analogue methods. Not just inefficient, this is also potentially dangerous when safety policies aren’t set up from the start to cover everything they could.
Automation is a word with some negative associations for industry, often being understood as synonymous with lost jobs and extra expense. But, as we know, automation can also be used as a way to augment and improve the ways we work and using technology to improve safety for workers can be incredibly powerful.
As the pandemic forces us to keep our distance from one another, the best way to ensure lone worker wellbeing could be to equip employees with tools and devices that empower them to protect themselves, rather than relying on managers and safety officers who may not have the full picture when creating policies.
Depending on the industry, these could include basic lone worker alarms that allow users to raise an alert when an incident occurs, sophisticated cloud-based management systems that log these incidents automatically, or even devices with a ‘Man Down’ feature to detect when someone has fallen and may be incapacitated.
All of this, in turn, informs future risk assessments with real, actionable data that allows organisations to react to the experiences of their workers rather than assumptions about what the risks and hazards could be.
The path forwards
There are many aspects of the ‘new normal’ that will become just a memory as we move further through the decade, but equally, there are practices that will undoubtedly become entrenched in our way of life. Only time will tell which is which.
Industries across the world have responded to the unprecedented events of 2020 with grit and innovation, and health and safety is an area that will benefit hugely from the mindset shift that has happened as a result of employee wellbeing becoming more of a focus.
Technology, rather than being a distraction or a way to automate jobs for the sake of it, can be used to enhance the ways we look out for each other.
Now that the world has pushed industries to discover new ways of performing their jobs in a safe and secure way, we must ensure that the genie doesn’t go back into the bottle.
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