How modern solutions are giving teams greater control over health and safety in the workplace
Modern risk management solutions are rooted in the notion that ensuring worker health and safety should be a precise and data-driven exercise. Said otherwise: when it comes to preventing workers from being exposed to unsafe levels of risk in the workplace, nothing should be left to chance.
This idea is most clearly reinforced by the comprehensive regulatory landscapes that govern worker health and safety in most parts of the world, including those set forth by both local and international organisations. These regulations exist to ensure that the steps taken to prevent harm or ill health to workers are standardised, as opposed to arbitrary or ad-hoc.
Regulatory schemes to govern worker health and safety have been around for nearly a century, and in that time they’ve evolved to address the changing nature of work and industry. And while these systems are designed to make workplaces safer, and ensure that workers are exposed to as little harm as possible, they’re far from perfect and, as a result, workers are routinely over-exposed to dangerous levels of risk, including risk from occupational noise.
In the UK alone, Noise-induced Hearing Loss affects 2 million workers. Globally, a staggering 16% of the world’s population suffers from hearing loss attributed to occupational noise. These statistics clearly indicate the need for controls and programmes at workplaces that go beyond bare regulatory compliance.
Today, risk management solutions such as Smart Alert by Minuendo are the natural evolution of this imperfect regulatory infrastructure. Smart Alert is a purpose-built solution for better sound monitoring in the workplace. Lightweight and easy to use, it was created to fully prevent exposure to unsafe levels of sound by monitoring workers’ exposure to noise from inside the ear, and alerting workers - in real-time - to unsafe conditions. With automatic notifications and actionable guidance on exposure, Smart Alert’s noise monitoring technology provides teams with drilled-down insights and critical context in an approachable interface that’s proven to drive better working habits.
The immediate and tangible benefits that this cutting-edge noise monitoring technology offers to teams are rooted in three key concepts: certainty, context, and support.
Benefit One: Certainty.
Traditional workplace noise assessments are designed to provide teams with information concerning the average levels of noise in a given environment, and estimates of the personal daily noise exposure of employees.
These averages and estimates are a great place to start when it comes to noise monitoring and ensuring that workers aren’t exposed to unsafe levels of noise, but they fall short of arming workers or managers with the precise information necessary to ensure positive health and safety outcomes. This is because traditional assessments take only a snapshot of the risk environment in a given workplace. By their very nature, they’re limited in their application to a dynamic workplace and agile workforce.
But with Smart Alert, the level of noise to which an individual worker is exposed is continuously monitored, so there’s never any question as to exactly how much risk a given worker is being exposed to. And because workers themselves are alerted to unsafe conditions in real-time, they’re able to work confidently, knowing that the power to take meaningful action with regards to their own health and safety lies within their hands.
Armed with actual data about exposure levels on the ground, workers, teams, and organisations find themselves in a position to make truly data-driven decisions that drive immediate impact, and help to ensure regulatory compliance.
Benefit Two: Context.
Something that traditional assessments of noise in the workplace can’t offer is context.
This is because context is the product of data collected over a period of time. Traditional assessments are based on averages and estimates that are determined from data collected in one specific window of time: this methodology simply cannot offer teams the depth of context necessary to take actions that will make an impact.
But Smart Alert’s noise monitoring technology not only captures the most reliable, most accurate, most relevant data available, it also transforms it into actionable intelligence that managers and teams can use to drive better ways of working, and better health outcomes for workers.
The data collected by Smart Alert is stored and processed in an ultra-secure Cloud environment, where it’s automatically analysed and visualised in an attractive, dashboard-style format. Teams can think of their dashboards as their Noise Command Centre: with the information available at their fingertips, they can easily and quickly identify problem areas and hotspots, patterns and trends, and more. Armed with this information, safety managers or duty holders can take swift, decisive action to improve or implement controls, reevaluate their resource allocation or ways of working, or take steps to ensure that their PPE is functioning properly, and being used appropriately.
Benefit Three: Support.
The job of managing worker health and safety is undeniably important, and not one that should be left under-supported. Risk management is a complex and often confusing area, and no safety manager or organisation should have to navigate it without access to a team dedicated to supporting them as they adopt noise monitoring technology and evolve their approach to occupational health and safety.
In addition to the crystal-clear and customisable data and insights that you’ll get with Smart Alert’s noise monitoring technology, you’ll also have access to a team of experts with deep knowledge in occupational health and safety, regulatory compliance, audiology, engineering, and analytics. In sum: your teams won’t ever again have to rely on guesswork when it comes to risk management in the workplace.
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The best way to discover how Smart Alert’s revolutionary noise monitoring technology can evolve your approach to noise monitoring and drive better outcomes for your workforce is to see it in action. To schedule your personal online demo, just choose a time slot that works for you on this calendar. And if you’d like to chat with us to learn more about Smart Alert before you book your demo, feel free to contact us using these details.