We understand that changing established habits can be daunting, especially if you've been doing things the same way for a long time. However, when it comes to health and safety, adopting a paperless management tool can make a significant difference in simplifying and streamlining your processes. By doing so, you'll be able to prioritize your team's health and safety while saving time and effort. Contrary to what you might think, making the switch is not as difficult as it may seem.
So what are the benefits of taking your health and safety paperless? Here are five:
Health and safety management is complex enough. From encouraging participation across job sites to simply remembering all of the different forms each day, it’s a lot to balance, record, and keep track of over the years.
This is one of the core benefits of going paperless. Modern health and safety software is designed to do as much of your job for you as it can, so you can focus less on carrying an armful of paperwork to the site each day and more on value-adding activities such as strategy, self-improvement, and getting the project done.
The importance of compliance on a job site cannot be overstated, but we know it’s not always easy to get others to play ball. That's why taking the paperless health and safety route can help encourage better site safety compliance. If it’s straightforward, more people will be willing to participate.
Fact: 91% of organisations that switched to the cloud saw an improvement in their ability to meet government obligations (RapidScale).
Everything that we just discussed above essentially makes health and safety activities more efficient, simpler, and more enjoyable for everyone involved. This should translate into a lot of time saved per day that would otherwise be spent on data entry, form creation, or waiting by a printer.
Check out these stats on how going paperless impacts productivity:
For companies that haven’t gone paperless, an average of four weeks is lost each year waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked or lost documents (Gartner).
Going paperless can improve staff productivity by around 30-50% (AIIM).
Maintaining health and safety standards, and especially maintaining strict compliance records, can be a bit of a headache when there are multiple job sites involved. This is another major strength of going paperless - a digital workflow is one that can be accessed anywhere and quickly shared with others.
With a smart H&S tool, no matter which site or office a particular form or report is generated at, it goes into the same central database. If you’re working at the company HQ, this is utterly invaluable.
Imagine this: You have a clear, top-down view of the entire company’s health and safety files. Every person who scans in and out, every form that’s been filled out, all that data, you can see it all, track it all, and make companywide decisions using the real-time data.
From the central location, you could create new forms or templates for staff to use across job sites, change priorities, communicate with key people, and track feedback, all from your dashboard.
Data is precious and it must be protected. So it’s natural to wonder if keeping it all in one location on the cloud is safe.
With a specially made HSE tool, safety is at the core of the platform. We’ll use ourselves as an example. With Site App Pro we’ve split up visitors, users, and admins from a functionality point of view, creating an extra layer of security. That means...
Paperless work is, generally speaking, more environmentally friendly than the old ways of printing everything. So, for companies trying to improve their eco-credentials, it’s a must.
Some quick facts:
The pulp/paper industry uses 40% of the world's industrial wood, which contributes heavily to global deforestation (WWF).
It also requires four times more energy to produce paper than plastic (NIA).
Going paperless cuts the need to constantly print new documents. This means, you don’t need to keep buying paper (so no more wasted paper ream packaging); you’re not using ink so, therefore, there are no ink cartridges (and all of their plastic); and if you think about it, you’ll be using fewer pens, too - and the ink and plastic associated there.
Then there’s the scanning. You’re not scanning anything to digitize it as it’s already digital, so there’s less electricity used and potentially no need for a scanner in the first place.
Some of these trickle-down effects are small, but small improvements made every day lead to big improvements over time.
Site App Pro is a powerful health and safety management tool custom-built for the Canadian construction and building environments.
We’ve made it as simple to use as possible and we keep it regularly updated for security and compliance purposes, giving you less to worry about.
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