[National Safety Month] Digital Tools to Identify Risks on Your Energy & Oil Job Sites

Embracing digital solutions can help improve your job site safety

As National Safety Month comes to a close, the focus is on the future—literally, the immediate future of your job sites. Hazard recognition is the theme of the week, and while it’s important to have ways to identify, track, and mitigate risks across all industries, energy and oil sectors often face unique risks. If your team hasn’t already appointed a job site safety officer, or a shift safety manager, to keep job site hazard recognition running throughout your shifts, there are myriad reasons to start. Here are some ways that embracing digital solutions can help your team prioritize safety on your oil and energy job sites.

Keeping Things Running

One of the most important things your team can do is make sure that each job site is safe enough for your work to continue day after day, even as the site shifts or changes. To date, much of the digital innovation in the oil and gas industry is focused around safety, and promoting a safety culture throughout entire companies. This is typically done through digitizing existing safety processes for more efficient tracking, as well as embracing new means of identifying risks on job sites.

These hazard identification tools can range from tracking eye movements to catch driver fatigue before it causes an accident, to forecasting inclement weather conditions that can pose a threat to workers outside. All of this in addition to more streamlined digital data capture for safety inspection checklists can mean better safety data within a single, actionable place. This consolidated data can give your Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) teams better insights into patterns and high-risk situations on your job sites. When you have better insight into past conditions, it makes predicting future safety hazards even easier.

Improving Communication

While there may not be many instances of solo workers on your oil and energy job sites, every time an individual is out on their own, they’re placing themselves at risk. Keeping effective and trusted communication methods available to everyone on your team at all times can help prevent accidents and catch dangerous situations before they pose a threat. In addition to your morning and shift change safety talks and check-ins, it’s worth ensuring your team has either cell phone connectivity or charged walkie-talkies available to keep in touch.

By instituting a regularly timed check-in for every team member you’ll be able to catch more than just how the workload is faring for the day. In the case of extreme heat temperatures, verbal check-ins can help identify heatstroke or heat exhaustion symptoms before they get out of hand. Additionally, as solo workers enter new areas they can confirm their location, or use a GPS-enabled device, so that in the event of an emergency, they can be found and helped quickly. If your team has already migrated their paper safety forms to mobile forms, these can serve to capture GPS points and photos of potentially hazardous situations, and in the case of low-to-no connectivity areas, can still ensure forms are accessible and completed.

Enhancing Existing Processes

Safety is likely already an essential part of your workday and a big part of the messaging throughout your whole company. But if you haven’t moved toward digital processes, then you’re putting your employees and safety teams at a disadvantage. Digital tracking for safety training can keep better audit trails, while digital data capture means better data compilation for analysis. Of course, this data can benefit other teams as well, but your EHS teams can see the best predictors for rising risk factors, such as vehicle maintenance tracking all the way to lockout tagout procedures. 

Whatever safety talking points or permits your teams are tracking, doing it digitally can make a world of difference. With better insight captured through digital means, whether those are project management platforms or switching to digital forms, you can better prepare your teams for safety risks. Additionally, you can make it easier to share safety successes and wins throughout your whole team, helping to build a culture of safety prioritization within your entire organization

About GoFormz

Move your forms online with GoFormz. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms from anywhere and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. GoFormz is the mobile and online form solution to capture your oil and energy data on any device and send it wherever you need it most. Through native integrations and an open API, take full control over all your business data. Whether your business needs better safety records capture or you’re ready to improve hazard mitigation with digital forms, GoFormz has you covered.