Making SafetySync an integral part of your safety culture can be accomplished in a few ways; with this post, we want to focus on using our Safety Bulletin & Alert component. As you know, communicating commitments to health & safety, identified hazards, and changes to safety related issues are all requirements for completing your COR. This usually has a follow-up requirement to implement a system in which feedback from employees can be freely given.

As seen below we've built our system to satisfy those requirements.

The comment feature comes with a host of options found in your components page. You can set options such as hiding comments until an administrator approves their content, and limiting the amount of posts a user can make per bulletin.

Over the next few months we're going to be making changes to the user experience in various areas of our system; this will help speed up your day and let you access the data you need more efficiently. We've started with an often-used function in your employee details page: setting someone's password and notifying the user. Previously you would set someone's password, hit accept, wait for the page to refresh, and then save your changes. We've simplified the process by adding a drop down menu where you can set the password without an additional page load. Simply set it and save your changes!

We've also moved Emergency Information into a single drop down menu that is hidden by default. This clears up a bit of clutter on this page and makes for a simpler user experience. 

If you have comments or suggestions about these changes please feel free to contact us and we'd be happy to listen to your ideas.

When completing your COR, the first requirement is always, "Does your company have a written health & safety policy that is signed and dated by management?" As many of our clients know, SafetySync provides the means to fulfil this requirement and many other requirements to receive your COR. Currently, companies have been uploading a .pdf version of their Health & Safety policy that is signed by management to distribute to their employees. However, to use our built in version control component, text policies are needed.

We've heard your feedback and have recently added a feature for our Premium clients that will allow your company's signing authority from your company profile page to be attached to any text policies by enabling the signing authority in the policy details.


Once enabled, all printed copies of your policies will bear the company's signing authority as well. Again, this new feature can only be enabled if you are a Premium client. If you are not a Premium client but would like more information on the added features, please contact sales@safetysync.com or call our toll free line at 1 866 668 6402.

SafetySync is pleased to host SureHire's new courses on Reasonable Suspicion for Supervisors & Employees within our Occupational Health & Safety Management System.

These courses are only available through special arrangement. Please contact SureHire at 1-866-944-4473 or visit them at www.surehire.ca

Part of properly dealing with a work incident is having an emergency contact to call for each of your employees. Many of our clients go the extra mile and keep multiple contacts on file in case the first one is unable to be reached. Previously the ability to add more than one contact was not available in your SafetySync Portal, but we've listened to your feedback requests and you can now add as many emergency contacts for your employees as you like. Head on over to your Employee Details page and get started with our updated Emergency Contact list.
 

We often get requests to add features to SafetySync that will help migrate HR information that is usually stored in Excel spreadsheets, paper files, and other means. We have recently added an HR/Notes section to the Employee Details page, where you can help eliminate redundancies between your HR system and SafetySync.

We've designated this tab a high security page as it tracks sensitive information. Therefore, we've assigned the tab its own set of permissions called "Administer Employee Notes" that must be enabled for an administrator to see this tab.

You'll now be able to track medical information about your employees, hire and termination dates, as well adding your own custom notes about the employee.

We are often told by clients that they wished the SafetySync online health and safety management system was available in other languages besides English.  The main reason we do not offer the portal in Spanish, French, and other common languages is because translating all menu items, buttons, table headers, search criteria, and so on, requires totally fluent developers, testers, and support personnel, which we do not have at this time.

However, it is now very simple to have the OHSMS, and all its content, translated to over 50 languages, simply by using the Google Chrome browser, and choosing the right settings.  Simply go to Settings > Show Advanced Options > Languages and spell checker settings, then "Add" whatever language you like from the list.  When you re-open your browser, it will begin asking you if you want each page translated.  Click on the Options button, and choose "Always" to avoid having to do this each time.  Each page translates in 1 or 2 seconds, and the original text (in English) is shown if you hover over any translated text.


Now you can tell your workers that do not speak English as their first language, that they can still use the system using their native tongue.  Training videos and narration obviously do not translate, but we are gradually adding content (lessons) in other languages too.  If customers have their own training content in various languages, we can upload that content to their portals very easily as well.

Back in September and October, Suncor Energy sent notifications to all their subcontractors that as of January 2013, their PICS audit will now include a review of the contractor's Drug and Alcohol policy and standards.  These documents include:

• Alcohol and Drug Policy
• Substance Abuse Assessment Standard
• Alcohol and Drug Testing Standard
• Contractor Alcohol and Drug Standard
• Medication Standard
• Random Testing Standard
• Social and Business Hosting Standard

Included in the emails were copies of the Suncor policies, which could be used as a "guide and resource for creating your own policy, including the wording and structure".  In other words, they are expecting their subcontractors to have similar content in their policies, in order to pass the PICS audit.  Suncor's requirements are based on the COAA's Canadian Model for Providing a Safe Workplace - Alcohol and Drug Guidelines.

You can build your own policies and standards based on this document.  However we've added these templates in SafetySync, so you may find it easier to simply choose from the template, and it will automatically populate your company name in the appropriate places in the policy or standard.

Suncor has stated that these PICS compliant policies must be in place "no later than January 1, 2013", so if you haven't already added to or amended your policies and standards, we recommend you do so ASAP.

Naturally, Suncor (and the PICS auditors) will expect that you will have communicated these policies and standards to your employees, and plan to carry out their intent.  So, with that in mind, we suggest you implement an online health and safety management system (like SafetySync) that pushes out these policies to all employees, and that requires acknowledgement from each worker.  This will ensure that should a post-incident, reasonable cause, return to duty, or any other drug and alcohol test be required, all parties will have been suitably informed, and you will have records to demonstrate due diligence.

We've always had the overall company's compliance progression over time (representing the average of all active employee's compliance), available in graphical format.

Now you can see the progression over time (the past 12 months) for every individual employee or subcontractor (on the 'Monitoring' tab in the Employee Details screen.  Here's an example of what it looks like:


Every employee starts at 0% compliance, but hopefully you see a steady increase over time!

We've recently added functionality for online webforms to be submitted into our OHSMS. Forms from Wofoo, Zoho, Formstack, Google Docs, etc. can all be seamlessly integrated and truly exceed the functionality of paper forms in many ways.

In this post we'll focus on our favorite form tool, Google Docs, which has quite a few advantages over other form tools, the primary advantage being that (at the time of this posting) Google Docs is free.

There are many different options for the types of questions you can create in Google Forms such as: multiple choice, checkbox, text, etc.  Using these options you can create multiple paged forms that direct an employee to different pages based on their answers. (Eg. Selecting "Yes" on a certain question will require an employee to answer additional questions that selecting "No" would have ignored.)


An employee who wishes to upload a form would navigate to the forms section in their employee portal.  Upon clicking the appropriate form link a new window would open with the form ready to be filled in.  Once the 'Submit' button is pressed the process is complete!  No printing, no faxing, no affixing barcodes.  The form can even be completed on a smartphone, iPad, or android tablet (see samples below).  Imagine receiving Safety Meeting Minutes forms from your crews right after completing a meeting!



All the data from your various forms will be stored on separate Google Doc spreadsheets.  This is highly advantageous to using paper forms as all the data can be easily manipulated in the same way you would do on an excel report.  Data from the same type of form can be queried for varying needs.

Feel free to try your hand at Google Forms, with a great help topic explaining the steps involved.