Digital Transformation of Workplace Health and Safety

The global economy suffered major disruptions, with many businesses either being shut down or forced to make significant operational and work culture adjustments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies were forced to quickly transform into remote work environments at an unprecedented pace. Further, they needed to adjust product mix and production levels while integrating new government recommendations and regulations in addition to addressing worker safety issues during the pandemic. This led to a paradigm shift of business decision makers learning the strategic importance of technology, and even more so, employee health and safety, as a critical component of business resilience and agility.

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to be a major factor with multiple variants including Delta, companies are now increasing their transition to a digital operating environment that provides more agile ways of improving safety programs to meet the changes for both employees and clients on a daily basis in a rapidly changing world.

In a recent survey of 899 C-level executives and senior managers, it was noted by McKinsey Global that COVID-19 has pushed many companies to rapidly increase their rate of digitization and technology adoption with permanent digital transformation of business operations. Survey respondents shared that their companies have accelerated the digitization of customer and supply chain methodologies, along with internal operations, by three to four years due to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused worker health and safety to become a hot button. This COVID crisis has become a turning point for many companies that had been reluctant to recognize the value of investment in health and safety management technology in the belief that EHS digitization would not provide a significant return on investment (ROI). This pandemic has opened the eyes of many who can now see that paper-based approaches for worker safety are not going to be sufficient to protect workers, reduce worker exposure, and ultimately ensure business resilience during a pandemic, a substantial economic downturn, or an enduring natural or manmade disaster.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Moving forward, employers are looking to accelerate their digital transformation of EHS to protect their workers and reduce costs, as well as improve overall organizational resiliency. In this unprecedented transformative process, it’s no longer only about safety leaders seeking to digitize their EHS workflows – all stakeholders involved in workplace health (employers, HR, insurance, workers’ comp employees, managed care providers, third-party administrators) are moving towards digitization.

As a result of rapidly shifting governmental and agency regulations during the pandemic, firms in industries with heavy regulatory and compliance requirements such as pharmaceutical and life sciences, research and development, insurers, and healthcare professionals are now primary drivers of EHS digitization. In these industries, the risks of noncompliance can be severe, and the ability to digitally monitor and predict business risks is vital to maintaining competitiveness.

Leading technology vendors like Xybion have responded to this initiative to digitally transform EHS workflows with a cutting edge cloud-based EHS platform, Emidence XD that provides the opportunity to digitally integrate all stakeholders in the employee health and safety profession. Xybion’s new White Paper will discuss the shifting EHS paradigm in detail, how a quality digital EHS platform can impact the worker’s health and safety journey, important features to look for when choosing your EHS software, and the benefits that various stakeholders can expect from a quality EHS solution utilizing a streamlined approach to unifying entire organizations.

The New Paradigm

Promoting a strong safety culture with excellent safety program communication and engagement is difficult with paper-based processes considering many employees are remotely working, furloughed, or out of office for medical related illnesses and treatments. Because so many EHS professionals are now working from home, there is an added challenge in accessing, receiving, and reporting important EHS information both to employers and regulatory bodies such as OSHA. Industry-leading organizations are now focused on creating a cohesive and agile workforce safety program by implementing integrated, cloud-based EHS platforms.

The best EHS platform, Emidence XD, can ingest and analyze all of these different IOT data streams with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, giving managers unprecedented visibility, insight, and power to identify risks in real time, proactively protect workers, and improve process efficiency. These platforms provide a centralized database for a single version of the truth and serve as a worker health and safety management tool to facilitate the creation of a connected safety ecosystem. A total cloud-based EHS software can eliminate disconnected data siloes by integrating the exchange of data between different business functions – EHS, claims, finance, compliance, quality, operations, HR, and more.

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White Paper