As a manager or supervisor of a worksite, it’s your responsibility to maintain correct practices and processes to ensure the health of safety of your staff and any other person on site or in the surrounding area.

By identifying and documenting potential hazards on a worksite, supervisors and managers are able to prevent unsafe situations, identify and minimise risks and uphold a safe working environment.

Doing this properly and abiding by set regulations can often be time consuming and onerous, requiring copious amounts of paperwork. That’s why going digital or paperless for data collection makes sense. It streamlines the whole process and creates a strong archive of the corrective actions and preventative steps you’ve previously enforced on your worksite.

Following the introduction of the OHS Regulations 2007 by the Victorian Government, “A person who is required by these Regulations to use any particular measure to control risk must ensure that the measure is properly installed (if applicable), used and maintained. The employer must make a written record that describes the actions necessary to implement the risk control measure.”

Although each state has different regulations, all require the identification of hazards and ways to effectively control and prevent the likeliness of them occurring. Safety and health measures can be abided to by completing a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) and a Safe Work Method Statement (SWMS) if the site includes high risk construction work.

A Safe Work Method Statement (SWMS) and Job Safety Analysis (JSA) through Paperless Safety Solution using mobile devices should:

Identify high risk construction work and steps within a specific job/process

By using a paperless safety application on mobile devices (tablets or smartphones), images can be taken of identified high risk areas and notes added to annotate the situation.

State the risks and hazards to appropriate health and safety for each process

Through collected user input, using the paperless safety app, features, photographs, speech, specific notes and procedures can be attached to specify the equipment or areas of hazards and risks identified.

Describe the measures to control risks

Notes, regulations, risk matrices and other relevant documents can be quickly accessed on the mobile device to understand the measures in place to controls risks and prevent any hazards from occurring.

Create preventative steps to implement the risk control measures

Users can then access the preventative steps in place to control risks. All steps can be sent from the mobile device in real time to the relevant personnel (supervisors and safety mangers).

By going paperless and using mobile devices and introducing paperless safety apps, these documents can be quickly completed by managers, site supervisors, safety inspectors or staff by photographing the identified risks, annotating imagery, uploading forms and entering in text/data.

The features of a paperless safety app should allow easy access to camera, speech to text in real time, offline capabilities as well as notifications that alert you if the tasks are not completed correctly.

If regulations are not abided by, penalties will be enforced, so it’s essential all preventative steps are documented and stored correctly. To make the process of digital JSA and SWMS more efficient, you can utilize any smartphone or tablet to help complete tasks by installing safety (JSA, SWMS) inspection app. Every employee has a smartphone in their pocket, why not delegate tasks to them and use their knowledge of equipment and worksites for the company’s benefit.

By Naaman Shibi