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Let’s take a moment and think of inventions that have outlived their efficiency to the point that they are barely used, if at all. There are floppy disks, vacuum bags, transistor radios, and analog phones—just to name a few. When we see or hear of someone who still uses any of these, we’re surprised. We might even chuckle a little or talk about how old-fashioned they are.
But when someone opens a spreadsheet in your organization to discuss health and safety, no one bats an eye. Look around your office and you’re likely to see someone using a spreadsheet right now to budget or track content. Spreadsheets are so pervasive and have helped us in many ways with their automatic calculations and pivot tables that no one stops to think about how inefficient they can be for health and safety professionals. This blog covers five of the things spreadsheets can’t do and shares why health and safety software is a more efficient choice.
Spreadsheets can make a health and safety organization feel “safe.” After all, a spreadsheet is something an organization has created themselves and that seems to be a fair trade off for what appear to be only a few limitations. Technology has an amazing ability to not only capture information but also provide insight into what is actually happening within a company. Yet, in so many organizations the only purpose of using spreadsheets to manage HSE is for recordkeeping.
Your organization may keep very detailed spreadsheets, but problems can crop up, especially as time passes. A new HSE manager might come in who wants to follow past processes but doesn’t know the intricate details of how the complex spreadsheet was set up. Plus, as the number of reports you must run increases over time and keeping up with what is happening across your growing operations requires more recordkeeping, your spreadsheets become cumbersome, time consuming and difficult to use. There is also the problem of “accessibility.” Does everyone have access to spreadsheets or other documents that are housed in a central location?
Spreadsheets can be an excellent resource for recordkeeping, but eventually these safety nets can break. The result is a black hole of missed opportunities for proactive health and safety improvement and risk reduction.
How much of your health and safety data is spread across multiple Excel files or even in paper documents? How many versions of spreadsheets with that data are stored—and possibly changed—on employee hard drives? You might not even know the answer to that question.
Spreadsheets are great for recording data or performing calculations on it, but they are not a good long-term solution for visibility into a health and safety program. Health and safety software, on the other hand, makes critical health and safety information available in one central, secure place—so you have comprehensive visibility of your data, records, and actions.
When you track and measure HSE and risk performance, it’s extremely important to ensure that it adds value in some way. Spreadsheets only really enable you to focus on the past. You end up focusing on data that is the result of an incident or information that is outdated by the time it’s recorded. This creates lagging indicators, which only tell a very small part of the story but does not always help you determine causality or identify patterns that you must address.
Health and safety software, by contrast, offers pixel-perfect visualizations that can tell your stories (think business intelligence visualizations). With the right kind of visuals, you can understand your health and data. Not only that, but you can more easily spot trends and patterns and use them for proactive interventions and to make more informed decisions about the future.
The spreadsheets everyone is poring over in a planning or reporting meeting are only good until the next data update. After that update, can you even be confident that it will be made across all the other versions of the spreadsheets that exist in your organization? Or even if you trust your team to create new versions after each update, they can’t do it in real-time. By the time all the versions are changed, another modification might be needed.
It’s a whole different ballgame with health and safety software. Update one activity or record, and it is immediately tracked through to any others that the change might affect. You also get dashboards that are updated in real-time, so that everyone stays current on performance, trouble spots, activity progress, interventions, and more.
“My favorite thing about spreadsheets is how easy they make it to engage with health and safety,” said no one in your organization ever.
Treated to health and safety reports generated from historical data, your employees have no access to real-time health and safety information related to their daily tasks. Nor do spreadsheets give them a safety voice. As for senior management, spreadsheets make it difficult for them to track your organization’s safety performance and make recommendations based on their knowledge and experience. Health and safety software enables employees to report incidents, even if they’re on the go, and participate in tracking their progress. Senior management gets unlimited access to performance so they, too, can participate in health and safety program progress.
Excel spreadsheets are an administrative burden. Because they were designed for tracking and calculations on a single desktop, they are not easy to maintain. They require people to reenter or reconcile data, fix incorrect records, chase actions, search for information, and update files. Not only are these activities a waste of time for safety professionals—and time is money—but they also affect everyone from entry-level employees to the board.
Think about it: how can anyone follow through on a health and safety program if they spend 80% of their time fixing spreadsheets? Health and safety software removes these time-consuming and costly administration tasks and enables safety professionals to do what they do best. Software gives them more time and tools implement and monitor programs and proactively address possible issues, which in turn saves your organization from bearing the costs of an incident that goes undetected until it’s too late.
Interestingly, if you look across your organization, you might notice that most business units or departments are using modern systems and technology. Yet, it is likely that your health and safety team are trying to do their best with spreadsheets and paper forms. What does it say to the people and teams about the importance of health and safety when, in 2020, health and safety professionals are filling out pieces of paper while everyone else uses the latest software?
By investing in an EHS management platform, you can see the same ROI as when the Finance Office uses specialized reporting software. With software, you take all your health and safety data and easily visualize it so that it supports your decision making, enabling you to enact proactive measures based on leading indicators, and takes a lot of the worry out of compliance.
Using EHS software instead of spreadsheets contributes to the goal of ensuring organizations are constantly learning and striving to increase efficiency across the board. EHS software makes it easier to safeguard your employees and determine various ways in which we can mitigate risks to acceptable levels. The time and effort spent creating, documenting, and searching for various insights in spreadsheets is eliminated, and health and safety professionals can spend their time sharing data and insights with frontline workers and executives alike, cultivating a culture where everyone engages in safety. HSE software facilitates fluid discussion and partnership throughout the organization.
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