Understand What You Want to Achieve:

Do you want to improve, benchmark your organisation against others, or evaluate the impact of change initiatives? At the outset, you need to consider why you are carrying out the survey, what you hope to achieve and how the information gathered will help meet your goals.

As a health and safety professional within a company, you will know that a positive safety culture is good for business, not only from an ethical standpoint but also in terms of productivity and efficiency. But how do you convey that to the decision makers within your organisation, to allow you to invest in resources to measure your safety culture, and improve it?

Decision makers are usually motivated by one of three arguments: legal, moral and financial. In this article we will focus on the financial argument as it relates to improving your company's safety culture, to help convince colleagues, up and down the management chain, of the value of a positive safety culture.

It has always been a standard among health and safety management systems to incorporate information on personal protective equipment (PPE), emergency evacuation, and incident reporting.

If you are going to bother adding a Safety Software application to your business, you had better make sure it’s going to be about something, the same way that buying your loved one (or friend) a current-model iPad had better be about something.

“Oh, uh, neat. I can watch Netflix in bed easier?”

“Or check your stocks! There’s a stock app—”

“—I don’t own any stock. I’m twelve.”

SMS stands for “Safety Management Systems” and it's best managed with Safety Software that allows you to -- you guessed it -- manage your workplace health and safety management systems.  If you're running a business, you likely need SMS Software. Why? You know that successful businesses identify and manage all risks that have the possibility to impact on your business objectives. Oh, and there is a fair amount of efficiency that comes from accessing integrated data for multiple purposes. 

But here’s the straight fact: whether your company is eight people or eighty, passing notes through an Excel sheet to track those interactions isn’t feasible, because you’re a consistent business with a predictable growth curve this year. That Excel sheet, or whatever system you use to catalogue and analyse your safety processes, is an ugly relic that needs to be left behind.

Sound familiar? Then it’s time for an update. You can taste it in the drinking water. You’re a smart, modern business owner, safety professional or manager and you need an SMS . If you're still on the fence about whether this technology is for you, read on to find out which questions to ask yourself when evaluating your need for safety software.

Safety culture, or the way safety is perceived, valued and prioritised in an organisation, not only has an obvious and direct effect on accident rates, it also impacts on productivity, reliability, competitiveness and even employee morale.