Your Health and Safety Plan: Setting Monthly Goals and Priorities
Have you struggled to manage your time as a safety professional? As someone who is often tasked with training, compliance, accident investigations, internal audits, and record-keeping, and a number of other responsibilities, it might seem like you have a never ending to-do list.
You might even find yourself going home at the end of the day wondering what you accomplished. If your day was spent “putting out fires” and handling the unexpected, you probably weren’t able to dedicate much time to the things that you had originally planned on doing.
What you need is a health and safety plan that allows you to set daily, weekly, and monthly safety goals. By following a plan that helps you prioritize your tasks, you’ll be setting yourself up with better job performance and overall project success.
In this post, we’ll be reviewing some simple tips and tricks as well as diving deep into structures and processes that can help you establish an effective health and safety plan.
Health and Safety Plan: Tips and Tricks for Managing Your Day
First let’s review some simple tips and tricks for managing your day.
Although your plan for the day will no doubt evolve as you get into it, many safety managers find that it can be helpful to at least start out with a list of things you hope to accomplish for the day. A simple checklist will do.
Another tip is to set reminders on your phone or watch. Have a meeting coming up? Need to follow up with a vendor about a recent order for safety supplies? Setting a reminder will make sure these things don’t slip through the cracks and get forgotten.
Something else you may want to think about is how you keep track of the questions and concerns that are brought to your attention throughout the day.
Do you have a dedicated notebook for this? Or even better, a mobile app that you can use in the field? Without an organized system for keeping track of this information, you can easily forget to follow up on safety concerns, order PPE, or submit a ticket to the maintenance department to correct an unsafe condition.
How to Set Health and Safety Plan Priorities and Accomplish Your Goals
Next, let’s review some of the ways you can set priorities and accomplish your goals throughout the days, weeks, and months.
The first thing you need to do is make a list of the various tasks you are responsible for on a regular basis. It’s helpful to write it out and see everything listed in front of you.
Once you have a solid understanding of everything that could capture your attention throughout the day, you can start to create a plan that allows you to focus on your current goals and priorities.
Of course, your main goal as a safety manager is to help your company and its employees avoid injuries, fines, and hazards. But this is an ongoing process. Over time, you will need to find ways to identify the most important use of your time.
One way you can do this is by paying attention to the trends and data of everything going on at your workplace. Understanding the current data will help you prioritize your upcoming safety goals and initiatives.
For instance, perhaps the data from incidents over the past three months shows an increase in hand injuries.
You may need to take a closer look at the root cause and determine why that might be. You may even consider scheduling additional training on hand injury prevention for some or all of your workers.
However, you may also need to set priorities based on what your supervisor requires, what your employees are asking for, and any regulatory deadlines that may apply.
For instance, annual reporting on your OSHA 300 log isn’t something you can just ignore. Refer back to the earlier section on tips and tricks for managing your day and meeting deadlines.
How Automation Can Help Your Health and Safety Plan
A great way to establish an effective safety plan that can help you prioritize your tasks and manage your day is through automation.
First, try to identify the repetitive and time consuming tasks that often take up a majority of your workday. Then, determine which of those could be replaced with automated systems.
Automation can free up your time and allow you to focus on other important aspects of your job.
One example of a time consuming task is contractor and new employee onboarding. It’s also very repetitive, as the only thing that really changes are the people you’re bringing in.
Think of all the work that is normally involved in this process:
- Training contractors and new employees
- Showing them your site safety orientation video
- Collecting documents and qualification paperwork
- Periodically reviewing records to ensure compliance
- Periodically reviewing and assigning new training requirements
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could automate some of this work and not have to constantly be the one handling every step of the onboarding process?
With GoContractor, you can use our online platform to automate the entire onboarding journey. Workers can self register, upload critical documents, and complete your site safety training. All from one place, before they even set foot on the job site.
An automated onboarding process such as this enables workers to start up to three times faster, since they don’t have to waste time on their first few days going through training and paperwork.
It also saves your company tens of thousands of man hours and dollars on every project. That’s because you no longer need to dedicate yourself or others to continuously onboard new workers. Instead, you can get back to those goals and priorities you’ve set earlier!
Get your time back and manage your workers and subcontractors more efficiently with online registration, training, approvals, and compliance. Click here to schedule your free demonstration today.
