Every time, I meet a safety manager, who is still copying and pasting safety data into Excel. In fact, in my last safety role as Head of Health & Safety for a large education business, this was the practice I met. Site teams complete a paper form, take a picture at the end of the week and send the H&S team lots of disjointed photos of incident reports. It was a nightmare. The member of my team assigned to migrate them to Excel spent over 10 hours a week on this task.
I rebelled against this very fast. I simply told management, “I don’t do paper” and “I can’t work like this.”
Now the problem isn’t just the data itself, but the process. Along the way, the data loses its integrity, is unstructured and hard to work with. The board asked for the previous year’s incident data - this was before I joined. Yes the data was there but it was unstructured and required days of cleaning and categorisation to be able to present something meaningful to the board. Imagine if I had to respond to enforcement in a shorter time? Nightmare.
If they had a well designed digital system from scratch, this would have been done in minutes, not days. Data is useful and easy to work with only when it is clean and structured and has some consistency to it. And sadly, AI cannot work with messy data. It wouldn’t be able to give you the insight you need. You still need to clean that data first.
And even more critical when it is safety data that is kinda special. It often has legal ramifications, privacy requirements, and very importantly tells how your company is faring when it comes to safety - unstructured data means you may never know until enforcement comes knocking.
Whilst you are still battling with basic data issues, other departments are thriving, saving lots of time, and look good in front of management.
What to do? What to do?
My Meaningful Data Collection Framework is a good place to start. Here are my 3 favourite:
It starts with some good old planning. Why do I need this data? What purpose does it serve? What format will be best for each data point? Whilst we may focus on getting these right, never forget organisational and legal/regulatory requirements must aid your decision making. We don’t want to go digital, change how we collect data, and get on the wrong side of the law.
Rigidity & Structure. Rigidity doesn’t mean making forms difficult to complete. Rather, it provides structure that ensures consistent, usable data. Consider the nature of each piece of information you need to capture and carefully select appropriate field types for each question. For example, for dates, use dedicated date fields. For descriptive information where you want detailed narratives, use text or paragraph fields. For standardised responses, use choice fields with predetermined options.
Branching / Conditional logic. This has got to be my favourite because it ensures users only see questions they need to see. This dramatically improves user experience while ensuring you collect comprehensive data when needed.
Here is one of the ways I have used branching in my forms. In the UK, buildings constructed before 2000 require asbestos surveys. Rather than asking every user about asbestos surveys, registers and management plans, I start with “When was this building constructed?” If they select “Before 2000”, the forms shows the comprehensive asbestos-related questions. If they select “After 2000”, it skip this entire section and moves to the next. Boom!
This approach prevents users from encountering irrelevant questions, reduces form completion time, and eliminates unnecessary “Not Applicable” responses that clutter your data. Plus people are less likely to abandon the form.
Your Next Steps
Try the above 3 points and within as little as a week, your data and dashboard will looking and feeling chaotic, and start feeling like you can really change the way you work for the better.
Plus you finally get the chance to look good to management. IYKYK.
Here are some resources for you.
Read October’s newsletter on Safety Data
Join my next Risk & Returns Webinar where we share real life examples and use cases of AI, Data and Digital Tools in Health & Safety.
Download this additional resource that will help you audit your current forms and identify areas of improvement.
This article is part of the NavigatorPRO series on building usable digital systems for safety professionals. If you’re ready to start replacing paper and spreadsheets with smarter tools, explore the 5 Tech Transformation Pillars inside NavigatorPRO.