How to Ensure Health and Safety Compliance in Construction?
Staying safe has long been a focus on construction sites, and hope alone doesn’t get anyone very far in that context. That’s where technology really can help achieve better, and more assured, compliance.
Paper forms, endless to-ing and fro-ing from head office, umpteen risk assessments which all seem to duplicate each other: achieving and evidencing compliance can be a complicated business. It can also be a time-consuming one – and that means productivity can suffer, too.
Our Under Construction app, based on co-operation with one of our construction clients, seeks to solve these linked problems – and keep construction sites even safer in the process. Critically, the app joins the dots of health and safety, ensuring a more streamlined and traceable documentation process.
Health & Safety isn’t about just one element – insurance, welfare, first aid. It’s about how all of these align and self-support in order to create a culture of safety. That requires a systematic approach – and our app helps achieve and then visualise that, with added transparency.
There are for key functions of the app that enable site managers, operatives and clients alike to stay in touch, share reports and keep up-to-date:
- Pre-built compliance forms
The app has inbuilt compliance-form templates that help you ensure compliance including SSOW, COSHH, RAMS, and more. All of these are also customisable to ensure direct and complete relevance to a given firm, project or site. This makes them easier and more intuitive to complete – and often quicker work, too. All forms can be updated instantly at the click of a button– ensuring out-of-date submissions are a thing of the past.
- Accessible briefing documents/Toolbox talks
Compliance is about more than just forms, however – it’s also about knowledge. Under Construction provides the perfect channel for disseminating key health and safety information in a way that actually reaches colleagues. With every member of staff having the app installed on their device, the material – included in briefing documents and toolbox talks – is available 24/7 to them.
- Instant reporting (e.g. arising issues)
Immediacy matters in health and safety. Problems need to be identified, and rectified, quickly in order to avoid adverse events. Under Construction enables this, too, since it connects sites directly with offices, and staff instantly with supervisors. Reports can be made immediately via mobile devices, and notifications appear in real-time on supervisors’ dashboards. This rapid communication ensures that colleagues can act on problems quickly, smoothly – and smartly. Knowledge is important, but so is action – and Under Construction offers both.
- Timesheets
Under Construction’s monitoring processes extend to timesheets, ensuring not only that staff can complete them easily and with a minimum of fuss via their mobile devices – but that submissions can be reviewed, stored and accessed easily and quickly. This transparent communication and retrieval of data about staff activity doesn’t just ease business processes – it enables a full overview of site access and events, too. And that feeds right back into the wider health and safety culture.
In other words, using a simple app can radically transform a construction company’s capacity to stay safe. And make health and safety compliance in construction a bit more straightforward!
