What OHS Officers Need to Know About Digitizing Emergency Management
Digital emergency management systems are transforming safety drills and evacuations by providing accurate, real-time data and improving efficiency.
- By Jeff Gladwish
- May 29, 2024
For workers, safety drills are often an opportunity to step out for a moment and gain a minute of respite in an otherwise busy day. But for the safety officers in charge of organizing and executing the drill, the experience is often anything but relaxing, carrying the significant responsibility of ensuring the safety of every individual is accounted for.
That’s why organizations are increasingly looking to transition their evacuation management, mustering, roll calls, emergency notifications and record keeping to integrated digital solutions. Emergency management systems (EMS) allow safety officers to take the guesswork out of the process so that they know exactly who is on-site during evacuation events and can access key information such as headcount from the convenience of their smartphone, tablet or laptop.
The Cost of Poor Emergency Management
When managing safety drills with manual tools, anything that can go wrong often does. Standard tools such as paper clipboards and megaphones may be easy to use, but they are prone to errors and redundant work.
One of the biggest stressors of safety drills and evacuation events is having unaccounted-for personnel, leading to a mad dash to rectify the inconsistency and potential safety risks. A common source of missing personnel is not employees but rather visitors and guests, as these logs are often maintained on separate systems, or worse, a paper logbook. In a real-life emergency, the last thing anyone wants a safety officer to be doing is trying to find the day’s visitor log in a flurry or panic.
Disorganized safety drills and emergency evacuations can jeopardize the safety of employees and visitors and have a material impact on the organization. As safety officers work to rectify inconsistencies in roll call, this can lead to prolonged downtime, forcing the operation to make up for loss of productivity, whether in overtime or by running their operation at a faster yet riskier pace.
In an age of widespread digitization, it’s astounding that manual processes still dominate the emergency preparedness practices of manufacturers, warehouses, distribution centers and other industrial facilities.
Out with the Clipboards, in with the EMS
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.