Ensuring Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) compliance is a critical responsibility for any industry, but it becomes particularly challenging in sectors where workers are required to travel as part of their job.
Unlike a static workplace, where hazards can be more easily identified and controlled, mobile workforces face a constantly changing environment.
Furthermore, there are around 1.35 million fatalities every year from road accidents.
This means HSE compliance is vital for industries like oil and gas, transport, mining, renewables, transport and any others that involve driving long distances through rural and remote areas.
The safest journey is the one not taken.
In such a dynamic and unpredictable environment, traditional safety measures may fall short. This makes it essential for industries to adopt tools such as the JMS app to effectively manage compliance for their mobile workforce.
How to ensure your business meets HSE compliance standards
Every business has different HSE, HSSE and OHS standards that they need to adhere to.
This is important for keeping employees safe in the line of work. It also ensures businesses remain compliant and avoid heavy penalties and sanctions.
To ensure full compliance, it is vital to research and understand the legal obligations specific to your industry.
There is also a range of other ways you can achieve compliance, including:
- Consultation: Involving workers in HSE policy-making should be encouraged to help identify hazards that otherwise may be overlooked.
- Communication: All HSE compliance documents should be circulated regularly and easily accessible. Additionally, specific rules for different jobs should be clearly visible where the hazard is most likely to occur.
- Training: It is vital that staff have regular safety and compliance training to ensure they understand their responsibilities.
- Maintenance: All machinery and vehicles should be serviced and maintained on a regular basis. There are sensor technologies that can also help alert you when a failure is about to occur before it actually happens.
- Review: HSE compliance should not be a set and forget process. Monitor how these policies and procedures are working, assess how they can be improved and make changes to maximise safety.
- Risk assessment: Every task a worker carries out should be assessed for any safety issues or hazards. This is especially crucial for workers who travel, as it’s the most dangerous activity they undertake in their job.
Automated risk assessment to ensure HSE compliance on the road
Driving and operating machinery is already a dangerous task for workers across all industries. This is amplified for those in the resources and transport industries when they have to cover large distances through rural and remote parts of the country.
While risk assessment at static job sites makes identifying and analysing potential hazards a relatively straightforward process. On the road, however, there is less predictability.
Drivers can be instructed on the dangers of fatigue and spending too long on the road, but who is there to enforce these policies when they are a lone worker travelling to a job site?
Hazards on the road can be identified and outlined, with measures put in place to try and avoid them. But despite your training efforts and stringent maintenance of vehicles, accidents, malfunctions and break downs will still occur.
It is vital to factor this into your risk assessment with automation to help protect workers on the road.
JMS ensures HSE compliance for all company travel
Knowing where your workers are and providing rapid support and emergency response is vital when they are driving.
JMS automates this process with pre-set checkpoints that drivers must reach along the journey.
If they do not reach these checkpoints in a designated period of time – or adhere to fatigue management stops – then alerts are sent to management via SMS, push notification and email.
This entire process is completely hands-free so the driver does not need to manually operate their device while driving which is dangerous and can lead to fines, loss of licence or worse.
And JMS automatically disengages when the journey is complete to ensure complete privacy for all employees outside of the journey time.