Each year businesses are plagued with a variety of seasonal dangers that safety managers must address and design programs to avoid or be prepared for. Some of the most common dangers in the winter season are icy roads for delivery drivers, drowsiness caused by less daylight, cold and flu season, and seasonal depression. Occupational health solutions aim to effectively address these and provide detailed action plans on how to combat them. There are a variety of tools at the safety manager’s disposal which they should utilize when coming up with solutions such as software, case studies, and individual employee profiles. Organization is key, so finding the most comprehensive software to organize everything is important.
Creating Solutions for Common Seasonal Challenges
Pinpointing seasonal dangers that will affect the workers in a business is the first step in creating solutions. Office employees will not have to deal with icy roads for deliveries, but they will be subject to cold and flus. Therefore, it is important that the safety manager look at past seasons to determine what the major problems were as they are a good indicator of what may affect employees in coming seasons. The best way to do this is to use OHS software in conjunction with workplace safety software.
A safety manager can access past incident reports and accurately chart if there was an increase in road accidents, or in the number of employees out sick with a flu or a cold. Some employees may be more prone to illness, or seasonal depression than others and if a safety manager is able to look at individual employee profiles they can provide more targeted assistance. For example, if there was a surge in cold and flu within a close-knit office space then a safety manager could look at the trend with the appropriate software and provide a recommendation that the company provide a voluntary flu shot program within the office or with their healthcare provider.
If a business is in a climate that does not see a lot of sun during the winter such as in the Northwest Territories or Alaska, then they can assess that seasonal depression will most likely affect some employees. They can address this immediately by providing seasonal affective disorder lamps for employees that request them. Most of these seasonal dangers have relatively simple solutions once they have been identified.
Developing an Action Plan
Once these predicted dangers have been recognized, then the safety manager can propose and create action plans in order to institute solutions. Having a set plan of action is the best way to keep track of occupational health solutions. Using occupational health software is a great way to chart the progress of these solutions. Safety managers can quickly see if a solution, such as a flu shot vaccination program has been effective by creating a reduced rate of employees on sick leave. These programs can also be assessed for ineffectiveness. All of the trends can be recorded for future use, so if a program proved to be effective then it can be recycled for the next season or refined and adapted as it has been saved with the requisite software.
Occupational health solutions must be constantly adapted, but in order to be as effective as possible they must be recorded and assessed for effectiveness which is managed by the right software.
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