HR Departments Must Utilize Employee Data To Enhance Workplace Safety And Employee Productivity

Better collaboration and intelligence are mandatory for a motivated workforce

Business awareness about the importance of mental well-being has grown significantly in recent years. With this focus, a closer connection between HR departments and the issues of worker safety and productivity has developed.
 

While the improvements in understanding of mental well-being are positive, leading businesses are assessing a broader set of intelligence – personnel risk intelligence – for a more comprehensive approach. Personnel risk intelligence includes the analysis of information obtained from multiple data points about workers. The goal is to help understand and interpret how they experience working at a business. This approach also facilitates the identification and quantification of issues that are impacting workers on a daily basis. These issues, if not identified early enough, can result in employee productivity problems, well-being issues, a negative perception of an employer, and, in a worst-case scenario, lead to a predisposition for on-the-job accidents.
 
Taking a forward-looking approach to the field of personnel risk enables HR departments and businesses to get ahead of these problems before they develop into a larger issue and become costly to fix.

Optimizing Workplace Safety and Productivity

The facts about worker risks and well-being paint a grim picture. The “Stress in America January 2021 Snapshot” study from the American Psychological Association (APA) reported four in five people are showing signs of “prolonged stress."
 
While there is a broad range of factors that contribute to this, these factors are often specific to each organization and the industry sectors in which they operate. This challenge of understanding unique circumstances drives companies to get access to better workplace data about their workers.
 
The type of data companies analyzes to understand what affects the safety and productivity of their workers begins with basic safety and well-being metrics. In addition, evaluations of workers’ engagement with their job, their perception of work relationships, workloads – both physical and mental – and other questions about how they perceive their job are all considered.
 
In many cases, this data is inconsistent and can carry internal biases – it is subjective data. To overcome this, high-performing organizations are looking to evidence-based frameworks for the collection and analysis of this data. Entrusting a trusted third party to perform this function provides several benefits. First, it enables the implementation of a standard, consistent framework for gathering and assessing objective data, negating internal biases. Second, it opens the opportunity to add further context to intelligence through industry benchmarking. Finally, it can drive increased engagement because staff feels comfortable knowing their data sits with an expert third party and will not be manipulated by management internally.
 
Once companies have this data, analyzing it using a standard framework based on a sound statistical methodology is the best way to gain accurate, deep and actionable intelligence. Individual factors can point to issues that could be causing issues with workplace productivity, safety, well-being or workers’ opinion of their employer. Patterns of these factors operating in combination can give even stronger indications of elevated risk in these areas.
 
These insights should enable the organization to implement forward-looking actions and strategies to address the problems identified and reassure employees that the company has their best interests at heart. Measuring again at regular intervals will help assess the success of the actions and strategies implemented. This is key.

Non-Invasive Proximity Analysis of Employees

But whether businesses actually have the data with which to glean those insights is an open question. In the last two years of Covid, many organizations struggled to accurately determine which employees had been in contact with each other, and who should be sent home to quarantine. Productivity and workplace motivation was impacted. Contact tracing was indeed in its infancy and useful data was hard to come by.
 
As we have learned and understood more about Covid and pandemics, it has become clear that the non-invasive proximity analysis of employees holds significant value for businesses. The use of Bluetooth technology in a business setting helps gather data that, once interpreted, may be used to help defend the organization against continuity issues or productivity dips because of viral illnesses -- particularly during pandemics.
 
Companies can slow or stop the spread of a virus by accurately identifying close contacts of workers who test positive for the virus. Insights from this technology-driven intelligence can also identify where a higher risk for infection exists within an organization while maintaining worker privacy.
 
Done the right way, proximity analysis and the intelligence it delivers not only slow or stop the spread of viral illnesses, but also boost workplace culture and employee confidence in coming to work during uncertain times. Proximity analysis and intelligence provide a visible indication that the employer is doing all it can to protect its workers, and that the workplace is safe. This capability becomes a critical component in the HR armory of capabilities to ensure that the company has a motivated and productive workforce.

Safety and Health Strategies Impact Employee Productivity

Those data analysis and intelligence efforts, however, must operate within the broader context of the challenges organizations face.
 
As noted earlier, the rising awareness of mental well-being issues and how they impact workers highlights the connection between employee productivity and the employer’s workplace safety and health strategy.
 
The issues of both absenteeism and presenteeism are where businesses often feel the impact of poor health and safety strategies. This is an enormous problem for American businesses, with one Harvard study estimating that absenteeism alone sucks $150 billion per year from the U.S. economy's productivity.
 
Over and above absenteeism and presenteeism, there is a range of everyday threats businesses need to face including economic, geopolitical, and supply chain concerns. Add to this the fresh experience of the impact viral illnesses have had on the health, safety, well-being, and productivity of workers and it becomes very evident that employers and HR departments face many challenges.
 
It becomes clear that employers should be seeking to implement proactive, forward-looking intelligence programs to measure and analyze the personnel risk that exists in their organization.
 
Understanding issues that are leading to elevated personnel risk, and proactively implementing strategies to address these issues, should be high on the priority list for human resources leaders as they look to improve productivity and maintain safety, well-being, and positive worker perception of their workplace.
 
To execute this, there must be an integrated approach that requires a strong collaboration between HR departments, health and safety leaders, operational risk managers, and operations managers. Executive engagement is vital as always, but there is plenty of value in gathering this type of forward-looking intelligence for both the C-level and boards can use data about personnel risk to increase their understanding of the organization and develop more future-focused decisions for the organizations.
 
A commitment to identifying the issues that are affecting employees, and addressing them, is an extremely positive message to disseminate to staff. But be warned, companies cannot say they ‘understand the risks and will be doing something about it’ and then do nothing.

Taking the First Steps

The next data-driven evolution for HR departments? Build stronger intelligence about the factors impacting personnel risk in their organizations.
 
This transition is, arguably, already underway with mental well-being programs and some of the collaborative innovation that has occurred because of Covid-19 and its impacts on how we work. This shift is driving greater collaboration between HR, safety and operational management functions.
 
An organization that strengthens this collaboration – and prioritizes the collection and analysis of relevant data in the cooperative work – can transition to a more data-driven, future-focused understanding of personnel risk. This collaboration will form the strategic basis for an improved understanding of what holds workers back, and what can unlock greater well-being and performance.
 
Ultimately, better collaboration and intelligence will lead to enhanced productivity in a safer and healthier work environment within a company that takes the initiative to proactively manage the risks impacting its human capital assets.

Author Bio

Mike Steere is a co-founder of SaferMe, one of the world’s leading contact tracing and safety software companies, with products used across more than 30 countries. Through the pandemic, he has worked with Fortune 500 businesses and other well-known international organizations, helping them to maintain productivity and continuity of operations.  Connect Mike Steere