With safety laws getting stringent day by day, businesses need to become more and more responsible for managing their organisations’ safety and compliance to prevent hazards while  abiding by legal and statutory compliances. This demands investing more and more into safety and compliance practices and platforms. And thus generates a serious need for efficient digital systems, softwares, and mobile apps to help businesses ensure safety in every aspect of business.  

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Selecting the best safety and compliance software for your business might seem overwhelming at first, considering the time, efforts, and investments required for finding, installing or shifting from one software to another, hiring specialists, or conducting training programs. 

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But if you invest some time in chalking out and understanding your business’ safety and compliance requirements based on your business type and the industry you belong to, the process will get considerably easy for you.

Digital Safety and Compliance Management Features

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Given below are some features that are must in a safety and compliance management system for most industries. These will help you compare different software and choose the best one for your business:

1. Workforce Inductions and Training Logs

A good safety and compliance platform should enable you to manage and track inductions of employees, equipment, and training for various purposes. Dynamic forms and checklists for all your safety and operational training needs. Being able to create and share inductions, training documents, policies, and checklists with your new employees helps you automate and simplify the process of onboarding. 

It also helps you keep logs and track of the same and tells you who your most compliant employees are.

2. JSAs and Incident Management

A digital safety and compliance platform enables you to report, investigate, track, and maintain a visual scorecard of incidents, hazards, and near misses in real-time remotely. One can report the incident so that the concerned authorities can investigate them and find out causes and ways to prevent them in the future. JSA (Job Safety Analysis) is a crucial mechanism for protecting workers, customers and business from adverse exposure.

3. Operational Procedures and Audits

You need to choose a platform that empowers your safety officials and auditors to conduct hassle-free audits for various business operations, assets, and sites. They should be able to create, update, share, and manage your safe operating procedures/ SWMS with distributed workers as well. This helps critical communication regarding various operational and organizational procedures.

4. Policies & Practices

Check whether you can easily create, maintain, and comply with business policies and practices. It should be easy for you, as a business owner or safety officer, to make changes in company policy and practice documents on the go. 

All the employees associated with the document that’s updated should also be notified as soon as the changes are made to maintain compliance at all times.

5. Pre-starts and Service Checks

A good safety and compliance platform allows you to create and share pre-start and service checklists for users and equipment across your organisation. 

Using software for conducting regular checks makes it easier for you as it is completely paperless and you can store the history without worrying about losing the papers or registers.

6. Digital File Storage 

With a central cloud-based file storage system and strict access control, you can share documents across employees in your company and give access to data that is only required for the scope of their jobs. 

Having a large amount of data at your fingertips also helps you make smarter business decisions as you can evaluate your compliances and plan business growth based on the status of your assets/equipment and the skills of your workforce. You can also rely on the system in adverse circumstances when ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ is demanded.

7. Built-in Calendar

A built-in calendar is also necessary to manage recurring checks/audits. When you assign pre-starts, service checklists, training checklists, and inductions to new employees, reminders will be automatically set for them or push notifications will be directly sent to their smartphones. Thus, making everyone stick to the critical timelines.

8. Interactive Dashboard

Your safety and compliance platform dashboard should give you complete insights into your company’s safety and compliance status. You should be able to see your overall safety score and the number of open incidents that are being investigated.

Also, the status of checklists that are assigned to each employee based on their role should be visible on the dashboard. So that when they open the system while starting work, they know what tasks they need to complete in the day and keep time for the same.