From Drowning in Paper to Building Safety Systems

In 2019, I was in a regional safety manager role but I was spending a lot of time on Excel, at my desk in the office. Hardly going out to sites, as I had so much admin. We had so many sites and we had contractors who helped us with audits and fire risk assessments - so my main task was reviewing these reports and monitoring sites compliance via an Excel tracker. All manually.

Meanwhile, this company was a technology company with tech and tools for every department except Health & Safety. I have seen this too often.

This issue is about something that held me back for years: paper and manual processes in Health & Safety. Truth is, I am not alone in this. It is still happening today. Hell, I stumbled on a poll on LinkedIn where over 80% of the over 360 H&S related respondents said they still used Word & Excel (aka paper 😛) and the comments section was no different. Talk about Digital Illiteracy at its “best”. Also kind of disheartening.

If you’re reporting accidents on paper or Word documents, doing audits on paper or Excel (yikes), spending hours cleaning spreadsheets before you can analyse anything - you get the drift. This is for you.

For years, I felt like a highly paid administrator because everything was so manual and laborious. In that previous role I started talking about earlier, at the end of the week I would have my report ready for line manager who would take it to his meeting with the board. Guess what? There was always mistakes somewhere in there not matter how much scrutinising I did before sending it off, due to the manual process it took. If only we had AI to help detect those errors at the time, I would have received less backlash and insults.

We thought growing the team would help. It didn’t. If anything, the problem persisted. I was still responsible for tracking everything. I eventually left that job but going to other companies didn’t change the problem. I was seeing paper everywhere! Even at large corporations.

One day it just clicked. I have always been techie - playing with tech tools, software and finding new ways to use them. Then boom! Why not use Microsoft or Google forms for accident reporting and even those inspections? While it wasn’t perfect, it changed things MASSIVELY.

I went from Reactive to Proactive. No more waiting for IT and the never-coming budget. I stopped feeling like a highly paid administrator and started calling myself a superstar 😂 - I sure did feel like one with the results I was now getting. It brought about recognition, opportunities, growth, career progression and gave me my first opportunity to truly lead as Group Head of Health & Safety. Today, I lead and manage software implementation projects for safety teams and it didn’t happen overnight. I also enjoy teaching others what I know.

If I was starting all over today, these are the things I would want to know and do.

I have seen expensive software get abandoned because it wasn’t fit for purpose, didn’t do what the teams needed, or people just failed to adopt it for various reasons. Before you get to expensive software, isn’t it better you figure out what works for you and how you work? Until you actually start using a solution, you are unlikely to detect what works and what doesn’t. So start with what you have.

You have all you need to get started. Errr your Microsoft and Google tools. Here is what a typical flow would look like.

Microsoft form → Excel (automatically - spend time cleaning the data plus Pivot Tables to analyse & visualise data) → Or better still Sharepoint (e.g. lists, custom views) → Power Automate (add some automation e.g notifications, creating tasks, approvals, you get the drift) → Power BI (take analysis up many notches or not)

This is a simple start and you don’t need to pay more than your orgamsiation is currently paying. Of course. the more complex your process is/gets, then you should really consider an upgrade. But first, START SMALL.

The above flow is you starting small. It is many steps away from paper and certainly an upgrade. It is not perfect though, but I will take it anyday compared to paper or Word templates. Yikes.

Don’t do everything at once. You cannot complete a safety management system on day one. Try

Garbage in = Garbage out is no cliche. Your tools will amplify your data quality, for better or worse. So before building dashboards or even using AI to make it quick, fix your data by doing things like:

In a previous role. the board asked for incident data from the previous year (before I joined). They were scattered in different Excel files and lacked structure. Zero categorisation. I spent days trying to clean and categorise that data and still found it challenging to present anything of worth. This right here! Is what happens when your data was collected wrongly. We can fix that!

Whilst you are still battling with basic data issues, other departments are thriving… Start today, by auditing your data. Check out this newsletter where I share how to do this.

Breathe easy, stress less and reduce human effort (and errors) with automation.

→ An incident report gets submitted. You instantly get notified.

→ A potential RIDDOR reported? You instantly get notified, can review, approve or reject by the click of a button. (damn! I wish I had this in a previous job where I manually painstakingly managed hundreds of potential RIDDORs)

→ A task gets assigned? Get notified. Get reminders until that task is completed.

→ A report or item gets deleted? Get notified. You don’t want important and legal information getting deleted.

→ A policy gets updated? Update a Log. Get notified.

→ A risk assessment is due a review? Get notified.

You get the drift yeah?

You can do all these in Sharepoint and Power Automate easily.

It saves time, reduces error and reduces human interaction which can sometimes be flawed. Despite automation being a life saver and reducing human intervention, the end result still needs to be verified and signed off by a human.

And very important is the need to gain digital skills and continue to supskill. This is no longer negotiable with today’s way of working. You are capable - but you also need to be shown how.

My experience over the last 16 years in H&S has taught me that the safety professionals who masters digital tools are getting promoted, getting hired, and getting the budget they need - yes I was able to win the board’s approval to implement a new software solution for the safety department 1 month into a new role as Head of Health & Safety. I don't do paper and I made that pretty clear from day 1.

You need to be good at safety AND using modern tools including AI to thrive as a safety professional. The question is - are you ready for what it takes?

It is not just the tools and skills. Mindset, Time and Willingness to let go of old practices is what will take you far. But a lot of safety teams do not have the time nor are willing to let go of their paper like I saw in a recent pole and comments section of that pole. It was a shock seeing these professionals declare they were sticking with their Word templates.

If you're still doing safety the way it was done 5 years ago, you're already behind. Not because you're not good at safety. But because the world has changed and the expectations have changed but you haven’t. YOU still have a massive opportunity to differentiate yourself.

You don't have to strive to become a software engineer or data scientist. This is about using everyday tools (that you probably already have) to work smarter.

…and in return, have my evenings and weekends back or spend them on what I like. Imagine having so much time for actual safety work and finally gain respect from leadership that you deserve. What a dream come true.

Where are you in your digital transformation journey? What's your biggest frustration with manual safety processes or even tech right now? Drop a comment below.

Thanks for reading The Safety Stack - simple practical ideas for building modern safety systems with data, digital tools, and of course, AI.

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