As your business grows, so does the level of risk you will face. As the level of risk grows, so do the number of hazards from the operations of your business.
IOSH stated that there were 142 fatalities in the workplace in 2021, up from 113 fatalities in the previous year, suggesting that hazards are increasing. Keeping this in mind, it is important to ensure your employees’ welfare is protected.
By incorporating a Risk Assessment Software into your business, you can help to identify, manage and reduce various aspects of risk. You do not have to accept the risks that come with expanding your business. In fact, with software you can manage and mitigate risks and hazards at nearly any turn. Here are six key reasons why you should consider Risk Assessment Software.
1. Accuracy and Relevancy
- Paper-based risk assessments are prone to error. Humans, after all, make mistakes. A paper-based system could cause difficulty in delivering accurate assessments and passing along assessments to the relevant people is certainly more time consuming when done physically rather than digitally.
- Risk Assessment Software allows elements of the risk assessment to be automated, reducing human errors. Software enables assessments to be passed efficiently to the right people for the risk to be evaluated and solved, saving time and resources.
- Paper-based risk assessments can easily become outdated if they are not updated continuously. Constant updating is tedious, so it may be pushed off to a later date or forgotten altogether. Outdated assessments could give an inaccurate reading of any new potential risks, and leaves room for many viable risks to be overlooked entirely. Paper can also be easily misplaced, causing issues with organization and efficiency.
- Risk Assessment Software can ensure risk assessments are always up to date and relevant, by storing and standardizing all forms in one location. And, with all your information in one digital location, the days of misplacing forms or being unable to locate the information you need will be over.
- Workers’ time is often consumed by creating risk assessments with only the slightest variations between them. This is time that could be better spent on other activities, and time that hinders the efficiency of your business. Further time could be wasted accumulating and analysing data over multiple sites and locations. Of course, with this data collection comes the potential for human error yet again. Standardized Risk Assessment Software collates your data efficiently and accurately, saving your employees time and stress.
2. Action Tracking
- When an action must be completed, it is often hard to ensure employees tackle the given task with the speed that you require. Requests mentioned in conversation, or even over email, are subject to being overlooked or forgotten. When mitigating risk, it is essential to ensure that no steps in safety processes are skipped. But how can you ensure this?
- Risk Assessment Software can allow you to assign actions and track them through to completion on a centralized system. This will increase the visibility of tasks and help to establish accountability. It will also ensure workers are never unaware of what is required of them.
- Risk Assessment Software can identify risks and classify them appropriately. This classification tool can help you determine what action must be taken to alleviate the risk, and action tracking ensures it will be done expediently. Say goodbye to the days of hoping your most essential tasks have been completed; now you will know for sure.
3. Real-Time Recording
- Recording trends in data is important. It gives you insight to what your organization is doing well, and the areas where you can improve. However, when using a manual risk assessment system, it is often hard to track risks in a real-time manner and collect data on their prevalence. Data collection is tedious, and interpretation can be even more time consuming.
- Results generated from data will be more accurate and relevant to your business operations, due to the use of real-time data collection and interpretation. This will make it easier for managers to view risks in real time and intervene whenever necessary. You can also keep a record of this data for future reference and incorporate it into safety reports and briefs for stakeholders of all classifications.
- Risk information can be easily updated and recorded. It will reduce the business time lost with administrative tasks and keep employees from feeling burnt out from tedious work. Instead, the information they need to know will be provided quickly and with no work required on their part.
- Risk assessment software measures performance with monthly stats, creating benchmarks and capturing key performance indicators from around your organization. This all helps in reducing incidents by making you more aware of what is taking place throughout your operations.
4. A Legal Requirement
- Paper-based assessments have the potential to cause later inconveniences when they must be accessed for auditing purposes or legal meetings. Papers could be misplaced and to accumulate them may be time-consuming. In the worst cases, these papers could be entirely lost or absent from your files – potentially causing legal troubles. Software is more organized and reliable, delivering you with what you need right when you need it. This will translate to an easier verification process for your business, no matter the verification.
- Risk assessments are required to be conducted before an employee completes work. Whether that be on current, new or unknown parts, process or materials, assessing risk is a vital step that you cannot skip. Lost or misplaced papers may give the appearance of an overlooked or unconducted risk assessment, even if you did put in the work to conduct the assessment diligently. Software ensures that all this information is stored and safe, so you can hold your business accountable and access information for regulators whenever they request it.
- Sentencing guidelines have become stricter in health and safety legislation breaches. Your business could suffer major financial loss if risks assessments are not conducted when and how they are required. This could increase cost due to loss of output; compensation claims and higher insurance premiums. Save yourself from the possibility of this hassle by moving to software-based system of risk assessment. You will be able to prove that your company takes risk assessment seriously and carries out proper proceedings whenever you are called upon to do so.
5. Mobile
- Users can create, edit and share risk assessments and templates on the go. Field workers – who are often most critical in helping businesses assess and understand risks – do not need access to a desktop to participate. And, even if they do not have a cellular or Wi-Fi connection, all of the information they input will sync to the cloud-based system when they restore connection. Nothing will be lost, and nothing will be missed.
- Schedules can be created to help manage your business workloads. This enables regular and ad-hoc actions, audits, and assessments are always diarised and available to everyone on the go. Ensure cohesive communication with employees by reaching them in the way that is most convenient to them – by going mobile.
- Mobile Risk Assessment Software leaves no room for any worker to face access issues. Having access to this software on a mobile device makes it more accessible and easier to use for employees at all levels of the business. This will sequentially help large businesses to function more cohesively.
6. Clear Representation of Data
- One of the biggest struggles in managing risks within organizations both large and small is being unable to understand the data you have collected. We have already discussed the struggles of capturing and interpreting data but putting it to use is an entirely different ordeal.
- Risk Assessment Software portrays your data on visually appealing and clear graphs and charts, so conclusions are easier to draw. Additionally, it will portray this data in the correct format, so you do not have to think about which type of model makes the most sense for the information you have collected.
- These easy-to-interpret graphs and charts can be shared with ease, so anyone in your company will be able to view and effectively understand the point of the data. These dashboards, as previously noted, are updated in real-time, so you will always be viewing the most up to date data, too.
Risk Assessment Software helps reveal risks facing workers and enable companies to resolve issues by taking the right actions. It can eliminate human error and reduce liability by streamlining aspects of the risk assessment process. From monitoring risks, to identify risks, to assigning and tracking actions, to accessibility, software can provide your business with an all-in-one tool to keep employees and business operations safer.
Reduce worker fatigue, the potential for error and increase everyone’s knowledge of the risks your workers and business face. Make the move to software and enable your business to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.