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Unexpected events such as a fire or employee injury can happen at any time.

But what surprises many people is how often these events occur. A claims analysis from The Hartford found that 40% of businesses will incur a property or liability loss within the next 10 years. Thefts, fires, vehicle accidents, injuries, product liability, and reputational harm are among the most common types of insurance claims.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to prevent these kinds of situations from happening in the first place. By implementing proven loss control strategies for your hazardous chemical management and lab safety needs, research organizations can manage risk, avoid accidents and injuries, and even reduce claims and insurance premiums.

Before we get to some of the ways loss control can save you money, let's first define a loss, as well as loss control.

What is a Loss?

In the insurance world, a loss is an injury or damage sustained that is covered under your insurance policy. Losses can include property damage, personnel loss, lost time, and legal liability that negatively affects your business or employees. For laboratories and research organizations, losses can include chemical spills and other hazardous chemical management incidents. When you experience a covered loss, you file a claim with the insurance company and they pay the claim under the terms of your policy.

What is Loss Control?

In simple terms, loss control is a method of mitigating hazards that could lead to a loss. This includes risks from fire and crime to chemical spills, slips and falls, auto accidents, cyber threats, and legal issues.

Loss controls include proactive measures like policies, procedures, training, and tools, like chemical safety software, that help reduce the frequency and severity of losses. Loss controls can also include data collection, organization, and visualization software that helps you spot trends or potential issues before they arise.

Loss control, or loss prevention, is an important part of keeping any effective risk management program successful and sustainable.

Now that we have definitions, let's look at a few specific examples of loss and loss control.

Examples of Loss & Loss Control

You’re probably already familiar with the concept of loss control, even if you haven’t referred to it by that name.

Imagine there’s been a burglary in your neighborhood, so you decide to install a monitored security system in your home. Because your new alarm system protects your family and property from damage (loss), it can be thought of as loss control.

One example of a loss that could occur in a research organization is a chemical spill or unintended reaction that triggers a Hazmat response. A good loss control for this situation would be a system that tells first responders exactly what hazards are present in a space because it helps them to get in and address the issues faster to mitigate damage.

Damage to a piece of capital equipment is another common type of loss. Training users on proper techniques, performing regular equipment certifications, and tracking maintenance schedules are all examples of loss controls that can help protect expensive laboratory equipment.

Finally, slip and fall injuries are a major risk. Losses related to slips and falls can range from minor wounds requiring medical attention to life-threatening injuries, lawsuits, and even death. These are common injuries when working with chemical inventory, and the conditions that lead to them are manifold. Keeping walkways clear of hazards, wearing slip-resistant footwear, and routinely inspecting workspaces for hazards are simple controls that can reduce the likelihood of slips and falls.

Why are Loss Controls Important?

As we said before, loss controls help minimize the potential for injuries, property damage, and other liabilities. By reducing the frequency and severity of covered losses, loss controls (and the EHS professionals who implement them) save insurance companies money. In turn, insurance companies reward policyholders with lower insurance premiums. It’s a win-win.

For example, many insurance companies offer a substantial discount on home insurance premiums for installing a monitored security system because it reduces the chances you’ll need to file a theft claim in the future.

Similarly,implementing safety training and laboratory safety software in your organization can result in significant savings on workers’ compensation and liability insurance.

Without loss controls, claims may occur more often than expected, or with greater severity. In this case, your insurance company may even raise your premiums or decide not to renew your policy. If you’re self-insured, then you are bearing the full brunt of the cost of a loss, which is often even more painful and expensive than dealing with an insurer.

Your Takeaway

• Loss control is an insurance-approved strategy that can benefit every organization, regardless of size or industry.
• Implementing loss controls can save your organization money by reducing your claims and insurance premiums.
• Even if you are self-insured, the costs of a loss fall solely on your organization, and loss controls can have an even greater impact.
• Effective loss control starts with evaluating your risks and understanding the likelihood those events will occur. Once you know your risks, you can work to identify controls to manage them proactively.

The easiest, and most accurate, loss controls are those done automatically. SciShield’s Chemical Safety Software was built by scientists, for scientists. The platform empowers organizations with a single, easy-to-use system that improves laboratory safety, increases efficiency, facilitates collaboration between Environmental Health and Safety (EHS)and scientists, and reduces scientist frustration. Leverage our scalable SaaS solution to meet your unique laboratory needs. Request a consultation with our team to learn more.

Did you know that SciShield is now a Certified Loss Control? Our customers are using our software to save money and protect their organization’s revenue - learn more.

Peek inside a lab on any given day, and you'll find scientists conducting research into medicine, pharmaceuticals, genetics, physics, geoscience, and engineering (to name only a few). You’ll see researchers handling cells, transferring chemicals, handling animals, and operating lasers.

For safety professionals, this presents a significant challenge. How do you keep a handle on all the people, activities, and hazards – all while preserving your sanity? The sheer volume and pace of data is enough to make your head spin.

Fortunately, there is a tool available that is designed specifically to exist in this fast-paced environment. In this article, we’ll show you how SciShield helps manage the chaos that is inherent in research.

Why is research so chaotic?

To understand why research is so chaotic (using an academic lab environment as an example), we need to back up a step. Let’s say you manage a research program with 50 groups. In each group, there are 8 researchers. Each researcher might encounter a number of different hazards: chemicals, glassware, sharps, laboratory animals, radiation, lasers, and so on.

Each individual hazard creates a number of compliance touchpoints. For example, a laser needs to be serviced and inspected, researchers need to receive appropriate laser safety training, and the proper protective eyewear needs to be provided.

In turn, each compliance touchpoint creates a number of individual data points. For example, inspection data points might include the date the inspection was conducted, the inspector’s name and information, findings, corrective actions, outstanding items, and recurring issues.

The table below shows how quickly all this information multiplies:

Now, let’s say one of these researchers moves to a new lab or group – a common occurrence. That one small change triggers a large downstream cascade of data. How do you see to it that all their information gets carried over? How do you ensure they have the appropriate training for the hazards they might encounter?

Running a safe and productive lab depends on your ability to keep up with the chaos and manage the data deluge effectively. Not only that, but in the event of an injury, accident, or incident, accurate information is essential. It’s your team must be able to go back and answer specific questions about what happened, where, why, and how often.

To do this effectively, you’ll need to move beyond spreadsheets, burdensome homegrown or legacy systems, and scattered filing cabinets, and start using a modern software system that can reliably collect, organize, and maintain all this data.

SciShield is designed to manage the chaos that is inherent in research

SciShield is different from other safety and compliance software because it is built by researchers and laboratory safety experts with one goal: create an effective, scalable solution that sustainably integrates safety compliance into lab and research operations.

Our management and product development teams have decades of experience in academic and pharmaceutical research, scientific software, education, healthcare, and aerospace industries. All that to say: we've seen what works (and what doesn't).

As we continue to build SciShield, we do so with a deep understanding of the challenges of the dynamic laboratory environment. We know that the system needs to be able to keep up with both the volume and velocity of data. SciShield does this in two key ways, which we’ll discuss below.

Active Directory Integration & Single Sign-On

First, SciShield uses Active Directory Integration to keep your researcher information current. In simple terms, Active Directory Integration means that SciShield connects to your human resources directory and uses that information to populate your users and groups within the system.

It’s an enormous and critical amount of data upkeep that suddenly disappears off your plate.

Once SciShield is linked to your human resources directory, users will automatically be added, updated, and removed. Whenever a new individual joins your organization, someone leaves, or their contact information changes, these changes will be reflected in the SciShield system. This saves you from having to manually update information and ensures that SciShield operates as a single source of truth for your organization.

When it comes to getting information into your system for your EHS team to leverage, SciShield has a secret weapon – Single Sign-On.

Single Sign-On eliminates a major stumbling block by allowing researchers to use preexisting login credentials, providing a seamless experience. It’s a rare thing to find a researcher who’s excited about entering safety and compliance data, but that’s exactly what needs to happen across the board for any laboratory safety software to succeed.

The effect? When a researcher has information they need to update and they go to your system, the scales tip towards “I’ll just take care of it now” and away from the perpetual excuse of “I’ll just do it later.”

Data hierarchy

Another way SciShield helps keep up with the chaos is by organizing your data in a systematic, intuitive way.

Data in SciShield is organized into Users, Labs/Groups, Spaces, Buildings, and Locations/Campuses. Unlike flat sets of rows and columns in Excel, SciShield’s data hierarchy makes it easy to visualize the relationships between individual users, groups, spaces, buildings, and campuses.

Here are a few examples of the types of information that is stored at each level:

• User: contact information; associated lab(s) and space(s); authorized devices and equipment; training records; job activities; associated hazards.
• Lab: lab members; job activities; hazards and inventories present in the entire space; equipment in use; inspection history; lab research overview; contact information for group leader and/or manager.
• Building: contact information for building manager and address; all labs within the building; inspection history and findings; safety systems; equipment.

This intuitive structure enables safety leaders to locate information easily – no matter how chaotic things get. For example, if you want to see training compliance for a specific laboratory, you can simply navigate directly to that section of SciShield. Or, you can get to the same spot from a building view or user view.

Once there, as long as you have the appropriate permissions, you can easily find out the total amounts of every chemical stored in a specific laboratory, space, or building in a few clicks. This type of information is critical for emergency management and response.

Not only does this data hierarchy enable you find information faster, it also helps keep your data secure. With SciShield’s permissions system, you can easily decide which levels of information each user should be able to access and set appropriate permissions. In this way, SciShield ensures that people throughout your organization are only able to view or change information that is relevant to their role.

Your takeaway

We’ve covered a lot of ground, so here’s a quick recap:

• Research environments tend toward chaos. For software to function well in this setting requires a unique set of considerations.
• SciShield is designed specifically to exist within the dynamic laboratory environment.
• The SciShield system succeeds where other solutions fail because of its use of Active Directory Integration, and its thoughtfully-designed data structure.

If you’d like to learn more about how SciShield can help you keep up with the chaos, let’s talk.

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If it feels like your research program is seconds away from spinning out of control, you're not alone. For many institutions, finding a balance between research and safety is a never-ending struggle.

On the one hand, academic research thrives when it’s at the edge of chaos. Unorthodox requests are commonplace, and you often must bend over backwards to accommodate them whenever possible. On the other hand, safety programs rely on rules, structure, and order to mitigate risk and prevent harm.

In this article, we'll examine some of the reasons why balancing research and safety is so difficult (if you find yourself struggling to approach a specific issue, you can check out our article on solving open-ended problems). When university leaders and EHS professionals share a mutual understanding of the environment in which they’re operating, they are able to work together towards a better and more sustainable solution for both research and for safety.

The PI is always right

One reason researchers are given so much leeway has to do with the way institutional research programs – and institutions themselves – receive funding.

State- and federally-funded research grants are an important source of funding for many institutions. In 2013, the federal government invested $24.6 billion in research grants for higher education – a third of total federal spending on higher education programs, and the second largest spending category behind federal Pell grants (according to a Pew analysis). Additionally, states invested $10.1 billion in state research, agricultural, and medical education appropriations.

Even with such a significant investment, research awards are extremely competitive. Often, a PIs and researchers need to make dissatisfying compromises in the direction of their research in order to make discoveries that are “publishable” as opposed to the research that they find sincerely interesting or important. All told, the pressure on researchers to find ways to secure funding can be immense.

Of course, institutions rely on these grants as well.

With so much of their funding derived from sponsored research, institutions may be reluctant to place significant limitations on principal investigators and researchers. Supporting PIs in their work and accommodating their requests – however unorthodox– is paramount to ensure the financial stability of the institution. This means more than simply providing them with equipment and materials – it means giving them as much freedom as possible without putting them at risk.

Freedom of research matters

Scientific freedom is a prerequisite for successful research. The American Association for the Advancement of Science defines scientific freedom as “the freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, pursue and apply knowledge, and communicate openly.”

For PIs and researchers to do meaningful work, they need autonomy over their experiments. Too many rules and regulations can stifle discovery. Without room to take risks and pursue unconventional ideas, scientific integrity suffers. Therefore, researchers can quickly become resentful of compliance exercises that create unnecessary bottlenecks and interfere with their work.

At the same time, institutions have learned a hard lesson about the importance of safety. The consequences of prioritizing scientific freedom over safe science range from minor to life-altering injuries to loss of property, litigation, reputation damage, and in the most serious cases, catastrophic damage to an entire building or loss of life.

Can anyone really be surprised that researchers and safety leaders find themselves at odds as they attempt to secure and protect their interests? Safety leaders need order. In keeping with the Hierarchy of Risk, they want to eliminate risks before they ever materialize. Researchers, on the other hand, must aggressively hunt for new discoveries in order to successfully compete for grant awards in the increasingly competitive funding environment.

Science and safety can coexist

The challenge for safety professionals is to figure out how to impose order on the chaos of research without overly restricting it.

For one, institutional leaders, EHS experts, and researchers alike must recognize that it’s not an either/or proposition. Supporting discovery doesn’t have to mean abandoning safety or overlooking hazards. Being safe doesn’t mean you can’t perform the research you want to perform.

Research shows that safety interventions promote productivity through reduced absenteeism, as well as improved performance, creativity, and motivation. In the laboratory, thoughtfully designed safety programs can actually encourage autonomy and scientific exploration.

It is critical to equip researchers with the right tools, training, and resources to work safely and efficiently. The pace of the ever-changing research environment makes a thorough and effective safety support program particularly important – there’s a lot to keep up with, and it can quickly become burdensome if not handled properly.

Done right, safety shouldn’t inhibit scientific freedom – it should support it and help it reach a sustainable pace. Striking the balance between these two extremes isn’t easy, but it is necessary to bridge the gap between research and safety.

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In part 1 of this series, we discussed some of the reasons EHS programs exist, and what they’re designed to protect. Universities – particularly those that rely on research programs to attract talent and funding – face a wide range of environmental, health, and safety risks.

Specifically, in part 1, we discussed why EHS can seem like such a burden, and how that sense is often a leading indicator that you may be dangerously disconnected from your EHS team’s efforts.

In many cases, your EHS team may be under-resourced and struggling, creating opportunities for risks to materialize and harm your people, finances, and reputation.

Let’s dive in to how EHS protects your institution from these three specific facets of risk.

People

Effective EHS programs protect faculty, staff, students, and visitors from injuries and illnesses.

While deaths in the lab are relatively rare, accidents and injuries are not. It doesn’t take much for a seemingly minor incident to escalate into something more serious.

For example, an accidental needlestick – a common injury in labs – can result in exposure to dangerous blood-borne pathogens. Additionally, needle stick injuries can often be leading indicators that there’s a safety issue with a process that could manifest again as a more severe incident.

EHS helps prevent these types of situations from occurring. When they do occur, EHS helps to ensure the individual gets the appropriate care. Afterward, EHS will do a retrospective on the incident (often relying on data from their safety management software) to identify any contributing factors that could have been prevented or avoided, and, if appropriate, implement changes.

Strong safety programs not only protect people from harm, they can also increase productivity. How? Researchers in a 2013 Nature survey reported that time and hassle were the biggest barriers to safety. This means that when safety activities were required, they took researchers away from valuable time on experiments and grant-writing activity. At SciShield, a productivity survey found that researchers spend 60.5% more time than necessary on safety administration tasks.

The purpose of EHS extends beyond simply preventing a disaster. It’s also important to recognize that students and staff who feel unsafe – or who have witnessed a traumatic event – are not in a position to maximize their efforts to learn or make scientific discoveries. By creating a safe and healthy environment, EHS helps reduce distractions and allows people to focus on their research.

Finances

Laboratory accidents happen more often than you might think, and even minor ones can be shockingly expensive. Direct medical costs such as emergency room visits and hospital stays are only a small part of the equation. Indirect costs such as lost productivity, administrative time, insurance increases, investigations, and OSHA fines and involvement often add up to 2-10 times the amount of direct costs (source 1; source 2). A single OSHA violation, for example, could cost your institution $13,260, while a willful or repeated violation could cost as much as $132,598. It’s tough to overstate how many expenses will come out of the woodwork when an injury occurs.

Even incidents that don’t result in injury can be costly. A chemical spill requiring a HAZMAT response or facilities work doesn’t come cheap. A laboratory fire can easily result in millions or tens of millions of dollars in property damage and significant downtime. This isn’t to mention the migraine-inducing challenges of having to relocate labs, source new equipment, find and contract skilled (and expensive!) lab construction firms, and re-certify a building or space for safe operation.

Effective EHS programs guard your organization against catastrophic financial losses, regardless of the cause. Research and experience suggest that organizations that invest in safety experience a return on their investment.

Reputation

Ask any PR expert and they’ll tell you: while it takes a vast sum of money and years of work to establish a reputable brand, it only takes a second to destroy it. Whether it’s an academic scandal, a shooting, a lab fire, or simply a fumbled response to a crisis, an unforeseen event can permanently tarnish your reputation. Years later, news outlets are still reporting on lab accidents that occurred at UCLA, Yale, and Texas Tech, despite their sincere efforts to make improvements.

Why is reputation so important? For one, it can make or break your university's ability to compete for the best students and faculty. According to a 2013 report by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, a good reputation is the top factor influencing students’ decision to attend a particular school. Reputation can also be the deciding factor in whether or not a parent sends their child to your school.

Because EHS improves safety performance and promotes environmental stewardship, it plays a major (if oft hidden) role in your university's reputation. A robust EHS program shines through in many downstream ways to show that you're serious about maintaining a safe and healthy campus environment. Developing safety policies, communicating hazard information, and coordinating a swift incident response are just a few of the ways that EHS can help you build trust and increase confidence in your school. Additionally, a smoothly-functioning EHS program will help your research program work that much better. When it comes to a complex, multifaceted research program, you want it to be firing on all cylinders, not tripping over itself.

Your takeaway

The key to guarding against risks is understanding them, and EHS helps you do just that. It shields students, staff, and visitors from hazards that can cause injuries or illness. It safeguards your finances against costly incidents. And it protects your hard-earned reputation from irreparable damage.

EHS is vitally important to your institution. Without the work of EHS behind the scenes, your institution would unequivocally suffer. Don't risk a hit to your institution's well-being – invest in EHS people, processes, and systems, and rest in comfort knowing that the foundation protecting your research enterprise is rock-solid.

The health and safety of your students, staff, visitors, and community is vital to your institution’s success. No matter how good your course offerings, how talented your teaching staff, or how much funding you have, your institution cannot survive without a strong environmental, health, and safety (EHS) program.

EHS helps prevent injuries and illnesses. It strengthens and protects your brand reputation. And it prevents and mitigates costly financial harm to buildings, spaces, and equipment. According to OSHA, every $1 spent on EHS can save your institution $4 to $6.

Investing in EHS people, processes, and systems should be a priority for every institution. That’s especially true for schools that rely on their laboratory research programs to attract top talent and secure funding.

So why does it sometimes feel like EHS is just a big money sink, or something that holds your research program back?

In our experience, your feelings about your EHS program often come down to how well you can conceptualize the risks present at your institution, and how well your EHS team is equipped to address those risks.

If you don’t see your EHS team as a critical and valuable resource, that might be a leading indicator that you’re set up for an incident coming down the pike.

For every risk you can see in the lab, there are a dozen others hiding in plain sight (and even more hiding behind the scenes)

Laboratories are dangerous and risk-prone places. Sharp objects, electricity, and a mélange of harmful chemicals pose a threat at nearly every workstation. If people are handling animals or animal materials, there’s also the risk of bites, scratches, allergens, blood-borne illnesses, or other respiratory exposures.

How well your institution is able to understand and mitigate these risks will determine the success and sustainability of your research program. Even for small startups like growing biotechs, safety administration can quickly outgrow your current solutions.

However, understanding your risks can be a difficult task. Once you know the risks facing your institution, it’s not always obvious what to do about them.

If we’re being honest, unless you’re in EHS, you shouldn’t be getting bogged down in the minutiae of risk management – there are many aspects to making an institution run successfully, and the details of risk management can be a huge time sink.

But that doesn’t mean you can leave your risks unaddressed. And that’s where EHS comes in.

EHS protects your institution from risk

The main benefit of EHS programs is that they help identify risks before they cause an incident such as an injury, illness, environmental disaster, or costly harm to a building or piece of capital equipment. It’s like the old adage goes: “If you think safety is expensive, try an accident.”

EHS programs help you uncover and monitor hazards in your institution and develop a plan to control them or reduce them to an acceptable level. From there, they provide controls (like centralize software training and lab safety inspections) to reduce the chances of an injury or accident. They’re also responsible for ensuring that your institution complies with complicated safety and environmental standards.

What to do if you have trouble seeing the value of EHS

EHS has to handle risk both on a conceptual scale, and on a staggeringly granular scale, all the while working within the complex environment of laboratory operations.

EHS is a world of hyper-specific details. How can it not be, when two seemingly similar chemicals may have vastly different temperature-dependent explosive properties? Or when the addition of a dissection procedure may cause an illness in an unvaccinated researcher?

One good first step is to just take a member of EHS out for a cup of coffee and ask them some questions about their job and knowledge base. We think you may be surprised at how many expert details they handle, and it will help you form a more sincere appreciation for the specifics they address so you don’t have to.

Is your EHS program dangerously under-resourced?

With the level of granularity required of EHS programs, it’s no wonder that they get quickly bogged down with administrative work and data-gathering. Risk and compliance data in a laboratory environment is created and changes rapidly. While much of the data collected seems like it may not be necessary, we assure you that once you find yourself needing a precise answer to a specific question, there will be no doubt about how critical this data can be.

Research programs have grown far larger and more complicated than they were even 10 years ago. With these changes comes an exponential increase in the work that must be done to mitigate risk and ensure compliance. Unfortunately, the tools EHS once was able to rely on (such as pen and paper, excel, or a home-grown system) can no longer keep up.

Some EHS programs expend a shocking amount of time and effort just trying to stay abreast of the compliance data that needs to be gathered and tracked, let alone all of the mitigating actions, education programs, and inspections that must also be done.

Many EHS professionals feel like they’re struggling to keep their head above water, despite their admirable efforts to keep the individuals at your institution safe.

If you discover that your EHS team is under-resourced, it is essential to work with them, to understand their needs, and to ensure your research program can continue functioning sustainably in a safe environment.

In part 2, we look specifically at three major categories that your EHS team protects: your people, your finances, and your reputation. For now, let’s quickly recap:

• Universities – and particularly those that rely on research programs to attract talent and funding – face a wide range of environmental, health, and safety risks to the sustainability of their operations.
• The primary purpose of EHS is to identify, analyze, prioritize, and manage these risks. This should free you up to focus on big-picture items and area-specific goals instead of being bogged down in the details that EHS lives in.
• Even though you might not be able to see it, there's a lot of hard work happening behind the scenes to create a safe and healthy environment for faculty, staff, students, and visitors. Occasionally, take a moment to really talk with members of your EHS team so you don’t lose sight of just how much they do.

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Turnover is inevitable at any organization.

But it’s especially problematic for EHS departments, where workloads are heavy, skilled professionals are required, and critical information often only resides in the minds of the people leaving.

Employees often walk out the door with valuable knowledge about processes and specific company issues that can’t be replaced. Those left behind are forced to try to pick up the pieces and reassemble the puzzle. Sometimes, the pieces are missing and you may not even know it.

In this article, we’ll look at the true costs and risks of losing an EHS team member, retention strategies, and how to safeguard your organization’s institutional knowledge.

What is institutional knowledge?

Institutional knowledge is the combined experience, skills, processes, records, data, concepts, and wisdom held by company employees. You can think of it like your organization’s collective memory.

Sometimes institutional knowledge is stored in known, findable locations (such as a software system or spreadsheet) and accessible to others in the organization. Other times, this information is stored in paper files, sticky notes, or directly in someone’s head.

Institutional knowledge is essential to understanding how an organization operates and makes basic decisions. It also helps to maintain consistency and keeps the organization running smoothly across several generations of employees.

Watch out for “the bus factor”

Losing an employee is a scenario most employers don’t want to think about. But what if you found out that one of your employees got hit by a bus tomorrow?

It’s a concept known in software development as “the bus factor”: the number of employees who would need to be incapacitated before a project would be unable to proceed. For many organizations, that number is one.

Of course, there are many events that could cause a similar situation. It could be a retirement, vacation, someone getting fired, maternity leave, or promotion. When an employee leaves — voluntarily or not — loss of institutional knowledge poses a serious risk to operations.

Let’s look at some of the specific challenges organizations face when an EHS team member leaves.

What are some EHS-specific challenges when an employee leaves?

Turnover is challenging for any department, but losing an EHS team member comes with a specific set of challenges. EHS employees play a critical role in preventing harm, reducing risk, and supporting research logistics. Not only that, but the great ones form strong relationships with researchers and other employees over the course of their career, making them central to the organization’s safety culture. Here are just a few challenges to consider:

1. Recordkeeping:

Where (and how) does this person keep their records? Are they easily accessible to other team members? Are they even stored anywhere external to the person’s own mind? Siloed information represents a significant risk to your organization and your team’s efficiency.

2. Inspections:

What inspections is this person responsible for? What needs to be closed out? How frequently do certain spaces get inspected? Are there any problem areas or issues that need extra attention? It’s important to know these deadlines so an inspection doesn’t get overlooked.

3. Corrective actions:

Is this person responsible for implementing or enforcing any corrective actions? Where are they on the road to success? What are the next steps, and what problems are the corrective actions supposed to be addressing?

4. Communication:

How does this person communicate safety issues and updates to researchers and other employees? Do you have access to the appropriate contact lists or database? Do you know what messages were previously sent, or which ones are needed, and when, and to who?

5. New employee onboarding:

Do you have a training and onboarding plan in place? How will you pass along knowledge of processes and job tasks? Who will handle “overflow” work? Who has the time, resources, and knowledge to onboard the new person? From the point to when someone leaves to when their replacement is fully trained, the risks associated with their role can spike. Make sure you’ve got a plan in place to uncover, and address those risks in the interim.

How to retain EHS employees

Of course, the best way to avoid these problems is to do a better job of retaining EHS employees in the first place. Paying employees well, providing opportunities for growth and career advancement, providing necessary work resources, and offering benefits can go a long way toward employee retention. However, in most cases these factors will either be outside of your control or there may be another unavoidable reason employees leave — for example, in the case of a downsizing, a merger, or budget cuts.

There are some steps you can take to ensure that valuable employees stay on, though. One of the biggest reasons employees voluntarily leave is because they don’t feel valued. Lifeworks, the world’s largest employee assistance provider, found that three out of four employees who don't feel valued at work are seeking other job opportunities.

Other times, people don’t feel heard or supported. This can contribute to burnout — a factor that’s responsible for up to half of annual workforce turnover, according to HR professionals.

Finally, 92% of employees said that they would be more likely to stay with their job if their boss showed more empathy. That can be as simple as asking about their plans for the weekend or giving someone the afternoon off to take their child to the doctor.

While your actions may be limited, when you know you’ve got a team member who’s a critical contributor, it never hurts to make them feel included, appreciated, or valued. Sometimes, an employee will stay at a job just because they’ve got that one team member/friend who makes the grind worthwhile.

How to mitigate the risk of losing an EHS team member

Even if you do everything right, some employees will still leave. EHS is a field where skilled professionals are in high demand, and turnover isn’t unusual. Sometimes it may just be time to retire.

If you can’t persuade them to stay, there are still some steps you can take to prevent institutional knowledge from walking out the door with them. We’ll leave you with these tips:

• The best way to protect institutional knowledge is to document it. Exhaustively, as much as possible. Have insight into what different people are responsible for to avoid those “unknown unknown” situations. Put procedures into place to ensure people regularly log the institutional knowledge they may be hoarding.
• Make sure knowledge of processes and workflows is stored in a formal system that’s available across the organization. Enterprise EHS software is designed specifically for this purpose.
• Don’t be fooled: just because information is “in a system” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful to others. Often, employees develop their own ad hoc systems that make sense to them but not to anyone else. (imagine going into your neighbor’s garage looking for a hammer — you wouldn’t necessarily know where to look).
• Don’t wait until the retirement party to start planning. If you think you’ve got a colleague on the way out the door, start documenting the scope of their responsibilities and recordkeeping systems as soon as possible to ensure a smooth transition.

Next:Reasons to Digitize & Centralize Laboratory EHS Data

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If you want to succeed as a safety leader, it’s not enough to focus solely on logistics and data management – you have to get good at “soft skills” as well.

To help you hone your craft, we’re writing a series of articles each highlighting a different soft skill. Today’s topic is getting better at hearing the word “no.”

How to handle a “no”

Picture this: You’ve come up with a great idea for a new training program. You’ve crunched the numbers, created the perfect PowerPoint, and delivered a pitch your boss simply can’t turn down.

You’re feeling confident — that is, until your boss utters the two-letter word you’ve been dreading: “No.” In a split second, your ego deflates like an old birthday balloon.

Rejection is never easy, but in the right light, it can be something positive. In fact, some of the top people in sales, business, and negotiation around the world will tell you that you should actually welcome the word “no”. It can be painful, but learning how to accept and even appreciate being turned down can help you move forward in your career.

1. Get past the initial sting of rejection

Regardless of whether it’s personal or professional, rejection hurts. It touches on one of our deepest biological fears, and can actually trigger the primal fight-or-flight response. In short, our brains are hardwired to lash out or run from rejection.

Before you act, take a minute to just sit with your emotions. The simple act of taking a deep breath can shift your brain from a primal stress response to a more rational state of mind. After this, it’s much easier to think past that animal part of your brain that’s panicked and impeding thoughtful analysis.

2. Mull it over

Once you’ve recovered from the initial shock, take some time to reflect on what went wrong. Was it a timing issue? Are people too busy on other projects?

Also think about how you presented your idea. Did you explain it clearly? Was it well-oriented to the audience? Did you connect your idea to the decision-maker’s goals? In the case of evaluating a chemical inventory system, for example, there may be issues present that someone else sees that you do not.

It’s never easy, but taking the time to understand why you were turned down will benefit you in the long run. You’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls in the future, and maybe even find an opportunity to fix an issue and try again.

3. Understand their perspective

Of course, it’s possible to do everything right and still get rejected. Maybe you had a fantastic idea, but it doesn’t align with your department or organization’s goals. Or perhaps there are other higher-priority issues that demand resources and attention. If your boss shoots down your idea for a new training program, for example, it might be because they are thinking about how much time will be required to carry it out (time that will also be taking you away from other efforts).

Instead of getting defensive, try to adopt the other person’s perspective. Better yet, ask them for feedback on why your idea didn’t work, and when you do, make sure you're actively listening. A series of studies showed that trying to imagine another person’s perspective doesn’t always work (in fact, it can backfire). Instead of perspective-taking, then, you might need to do some perspective-getting.

By looking at things from a different point of view, you’ll gain a better understanding of why they said “no” in the first place — and again, perhaps develop a better way to approach the problem.

4. Move forward

As we said before, rejection isn’t always a bad thing. Getting turned down for a promotion might be the push that's needed to start your job search and find an employer who values your talents. Or, having your idea shot down might force you to come up with an even better solution — one you wouldn't have thought of before.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs — including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Arianna Huffington, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney, and Thomas Edison — were rejected many times before they found success.

Instead of dwelling on rejection, here’s what successful people do: they look at each defeat as a failed experiment. When a scientist performs an experiment, they learn from each result — whether successful or not. If one thing doesn’t work, they simply move on and try something else. This test-and-learn approach can help you see each setback as a learning experience instead of a catastrophic failure. If you're having a hard time figuring out a good next forward step, we've got a great article on solving open-ended problems.

Your takeaway

Hearing the word “no” is never easy, but following these tips can help soothe the sting. In fact, you might discover that this minor bump in the road led you in a much more productive direction.

• Get past the initial sting. Take a deep breath to quell the mental and physical effects of the Fight or Flight response that can be triggered from rejection.
• Mull it over. A “No” can mean a few different things, and it can be helpful to understand exactly why this particular proposition was rejected.
• Understand their perspective. Better yet, ask them for their reasoning in a non-confrontational way. This can even lead to an improved, more trusting relationship.
• Move forward. While it can be tough, don’t let your “No’s” hinder you. Take what constructive things you can from the “No” and use it to climb to bigger and better heights.

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Here’s a secret most software vendors won’t tell you: Building a powerful, user-friendly EHS software system is expensive and challenging.

It’s not as simple as just “writing code.” It takes thousands of hours of work and a team of engineers, developers, UX and UI designers, and subject matter experts (and the good ones are in high demand).

Not only that, but there’s also the cost of keeping the software up and running properly through testing, maintenance, security, implementation, support, and new feature development.

That all adds up quickly.

Keeping an eye out for red flags

Most companies shy away from that recurring cost, preferring large profit margins over providing the best possible, most sustainable solution.

To help you avoid frustrations down the road, we're showing you three of the most common areas where software vendors cut corners.

1. IT security

‘Cutting corners’ means doing something the easiest, cheapest, or fastest way, as opposed to taking a more difficult but higher-quality or more sustainable path. In the software world, this frequently translates to skimping on security services and best practices.

It makes sense: rock-solid IT infrastructure and support is expensive, and many of the critical aspects of security are things the average person isn’t aware of and will likely never see in practice (or know to look for).

A vendor might not take the time to review every piece of new code for vulnerabilities, for example, or decide not to perform regular penetration testing. Even a minor weakness can be exploited by cybercriminals, exposing your sensitive data to a breach and public event.

Infrastructure support is another area where vendors might take shortcuts. Again, these are usually things you can’t see — at least, not until a disruption or disaster happens (this is why it’s so critical to ask about these topics early on when looking at a new piece of software).

High availability, resilience, and disaster recovery are all crucial components that form the foundation for a good software solution. With backups, for example, best practices include:

• Standard local backups: data is kept close at hand for quick recovery
• Off-site backups: data is sent over a network to servers across the country
• Secure facility backups: data is put on tape and transported to another physical location
• Cold site: a location used for backup in the event of a disaster at the main datacenter

Without these elements in place, you may not be able to recover data quickly in the event of a disruption or disaster. It generally doesn’t matter too much... right up until the moment when it matters the most. And at that moment, you’ve either got the data somewhere else, or you’re left without a paddle.

Ask yourself, what would happen to your laboratory and safety operations if you woke up one day and discovered that every piece of your safety information had disappeared in a puff of smoke?

2. Building for instant gratification

Keep a wary eye out for any software provider focused on bells and whistles instead of long-term support and usability.

Overselling is a common practice among software vendors. In fact, a recent NAEM report found that being oversold on a system that doesn’t perform as advertised is one of the biggest reasons for dissatisfaction among EHS software buyers.

Sometimes, a vendor will encourage customization just to make the sale. The problem with this is that customization requires extensive coding and testing to perform as desired. In some cases, these customization issues can even cause issues during the implementation phase.

Note that this is different from configuration, which is personalization that occurs through administrative screens and modules without changing the underlying code. Think about it like this: Configuration — “Can I have my vending machine sell different snacks?” Customization — “Can my vending machine serve ice cream AND on-demand coffee drinks?”

A similar issue to saying “yes” to customization happens when vendors say “yes” to every feature request that comes along. In both scenarios, developers rush to build features, mistakes get made, and the vendor falls behind on critical ongoing activities like support and updates. In many cases, custom development negatively impacts other areas of your system, and you don’t know until it’s too late. You’re left with a system that’s much more expensive for the vendor to properly maintain, and often doesn’t work as promised.

Other times, vendors cut corners on customer success. After all, it’s expensive to have a dedicated implementation and support team — and it’s something many buyers don’t think about until they’ve signed a contract. Unfortunately, many vendors work hard for the sale but don’t commit the proper resources for what comes next.

The result is that you’ve got an expensive, (hopefully) powerful new system, but no realistic way to use it or have it support your needs (you can learn more about why implementations fail — and how to avoid it — here). The most powerful tool in the world won’t help you much if you don’t know how to use it.

3. Mobile apps

The hidden costs of creating and managing a mobile app are substantial. When resources go to a mobile app, it’s important to ask “is this being done because there’s a true need, or because the provider wants to check a box?”

To understand why, let's back up a step and focus on an important distinction: mobile apps are different from mobile functionality.

Mobile functionality means that you can access a program from a mobile device through your browser, whereas a mobile app is a program that is downloaded and installed on the device itself.

Building a mobile app is extremely labor intensive. It requires a great deal of development time, attention to the user interface, special coding, and so on. It's a lot like rebuilding the entire original software from scratch. Mobile app security also comes with its own set of considerations, from securing the device itself to protecting data at rest and in transit. As much as we love our phones, boy, are there a lot of vulnerabilities present in them when the data is downloaded to the actual device. Multiply that times (potentially) thousands of users at your organization, and you are taking on a high-risk endeavor.

Unfortunately, some vendors know just how appealing the sound of a mobile app can be. So, they sprint to push out a mobile app and rush it to market without giving it the attention it deserves. Or they try to build a low-cost app which doesn’t actually work as advertised. Sometimes, the app works fine, but critical resources that should be spent on improving and maintaining the main software get pulled away and reallocated.

A poorly built app puts your data at risk. This is such a critical point that we can’t stress it enough.

A poorly built app puts your sensitive data at risk of being targeted, stolen, sold, and distributed by malicious actors.

A recent study conducted by Nielsen found that the average smartphone user has 26 apps installed, and most of them come with privacy and security issues. What’s more, many apps store data on your device — so if your phone gets lost or stolen, your sensitive data goes with it.

If someone now knows the route you take when you’re walking your dog, not the biggest deal.

If someone now knows exactly where you store your pyrophoric chemicals, schedule I substances, and radiation sources, slightly bigger deal.

The problem with vulnerable apps is they often act like dominos. Someone could leverage a vulnerable app to gain access to data that is normally secure, like your bank account, credit card information, healthcare records, and email.

Similarly, a weak EHS mobile app can expose your sensitive laboratory data — and not just to outsiders. According to the Information Security Forum, insiders are responsible for 54% of data breaches. These breaches fall into three categories: malicious, negligent, and accidental. While mobile apps are convenient, poorly built apps are a risk.

Your takeaway

While there are many vendors who operate with a high level of integrity, competition is fierce, and some vendors have been known to cut corners to keep costs low and make the sale. Knowing about these common shortcuts ahead of time will help you ask the right questions and find a reputable vendor you can trust.

Be wary of any vendor who promises short timelines on custom development projects and be sure to ask lots of questions.

And remember that as with most things, unfortunately, if it seems too good to be true — it probably is.

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To help you hone your craft, we’re writing a series of articles each highlighting a different soft skill. Today’s topic is solving open-ended problems with the four-step process below:

1. Define your goal
2. Establish your parameters
3. Identify your resources
4. Make an informed decision

The core of this strategy revolves around working backwards to solve an open-ended problem so that you always have a reason for the decisions you’re making.

Let’s dive in.

What is an open-ended problem?

An open-ended problem is a problem where the solution or path to the solution is unclear. Unlike closed-ended problems, which have only one solution, open-ended problems have many possible solutions.

That makes solving open-ended problems much more difficult. Before you can make a decision, you’ll need to consider many different approaches and weigh the pros and cons of each one.

When it comes to your career, solving open-ended problems is an essential skill, and one that will solve you in many personal situations as well. Below, we’ll outline one solid strategy that you can employ the next time you feel like you need to produce a great result.

How to solve open-ended problems

Imagine your boss storms into your office on Monday morning and tells you she’s unhappy with your organization’s lab inspection performance. You have too many labs that have not been inspected recently, too many outstanding unresolved corrective actions, and you needed to fix it yesterday. She leaves in a huff.

Now what?

Depending on your temperament, you might want to immediately spring into action. And while it’s good to be decisive, if you act without considering all your options, you run the risk of making a poor decision.

On the other hand, you might be the type of person who likes to analyze every possible scenario before making a decision. Again, that’s helpful in some situations, but you might end up analyzing the problem for so long that you’re unable to act at all (we’ll get more into Analysis Paralysis later in the article).

Fortunately, there is a middle ground that will enable you to solve problems without overanalyzing or jumping the gun. It follows these four steps:

1. Define your goal
2. Establish your parameters
3. Identify your resources
4. Make an informed decision

As we mentioned above, the core of this strategy revolves around working backwards to solve an open-ended problem so that you always have a reason for the decisions you’re making. In the chaos inherent in the research environment, it's critical to have a strong compass to guide you.

If you ever find yourself feeling like you don’t have a reason for making a decision, it’s a great signal that there’s more work to be done somewhere earlier in the process.

1. Define your goal

Before you begin evaluating solutions, it’s important to articulate what you want to accomplish. Without a clearly defined goal, your problem-solving efforts will lack direction. That makes it easy to get off track or make an unsatisfactory choice. When you know what your desired end result looks like, it’s much easier to focus your time and resources.

Defining your end result is especially important if you’re trying to solve a problem that involves other stakeholders (like your boss). Make sure you're actively listening to the other person so that you understand the final outcome they want. Otherwise, you run the risk of choosing a solution that solves the problem as you understood it, but doesn’t meet the criteria the other person expected.

Once you have your goal, write it out clearly. Writing down your goal is important because it gives you something to refer back to as you’re making decisions. Also, by putting in writing what you want to accomplish, it forces you to get specific about your desired outcome.

When you write down your goal, add a few notes about why it’s the goal. These details can be invaluable later on in the process when you’re trying to decide why to choose one line of action over another.

What are the must haves for your solution to be successful? What are the things that, if you don’t hit on, will mean failure? Write these out as well, and then pause for a moment. Is this everything? Are there some things on the list that are more of a “nice to have” than a “must have”?

Sometimes, an attempt to unearth a complex solution gets bogged down trying to satisfy a bunch of results that, at the end of the day, aren’t actually mission critical.

2. Establish your parameters

At this point, you may recognize that there are dozens of possible solutions.

Good news: this is where we’re about to narrow things down a whole lot more. Establishing your parameters can help you shrink your list from 20 options to only a handful.

What are your limitations? What are the things you have to work around? At this stage, you should be thinking about what you don’t have more than what you do. When you understand what’s limiting you, it makes it easier to understand which resources you have that are truly valuable, and how you can apply them in the most efficacious way.

If your goal is to increase your organization’s inspection performance, you’d need to consider the number of inspectors you have available, the time frames you have to work within, the funding you’ve been given, and the ways you can approach the task.

Many people view limitations as a negative. However, constraints can be quite helpful when solving open-ended problems, as they free you up to focus only on tenable solutions. There’s a great saying to describe this seeming paradox: “Restriction breeds creativity.”

Perhaps when considering how to improve your inspections, you realize you’ve only got 3 months to produce results, or that ⅓ of your inspection team is going to be on vacation for a chunk of time in the next few months, or that you have a giant project coming soon that’s going to absorb a large amount of your bandwidth. These are all useful realizations, because they help you do a better job of what’s important, instead of getting distracted by nonessentials.

3. Identify your resources

Now that you know your limitations, what resources do you have available?

Resources most often include people, funds, equipment, information, and time. Maybe a resource is that you have a high-quality Single Source of Truth you can rely on for information. Sometimes, thinking about your resources helps you realize that you may have forgotten an important parameter – that’s great! Just go back, add it, and see if that provides more clarity for you.

Remember that some resources may only be available at certain times. It’s critical to understand these conditions before you embark on a solution.

For example, let’s say you have two full time inspectors available until next quarter, an available budget of $10,000, or an active researcher safety group you can leverage to help you out. Knowing that these resources are available lets you craft your plan to maximize the effect you can extract from them.

4. Make an informed decision (and avoid analysis paralysis)

After you’ve defined your goal, established your parameters, and identified your resources, you’re left with a handful of possible solutions. Now the time has come to put pen to paper and develop a plan. How do you decide what to do?

The beauty of this methodology is that by the time you reach this step, your path should be reasonably clear. You’ve laid out your goals, restrictions, and resources in such a way that your viable courses of action are limited, and thus easier to choose from.

When they don’t employ a methodology like this, the decision steps are where people most often get stuck. They spend so much time analyzing and overthinking each option that they’re unable to make a decision – a phenomenon known to psychologists as analysis paralysis.

You’ve probably encountered analysis paralysis when you’re at the drugstore staring at 130 different tubes of toothpaste. Or when you’re ordering off a menu with lots of different (and hopefully delicious) dishes.

Research shows that when faced with too many choices, people are less likely to make a choice at all – and if they do, they’re typically less satisfied with their selection.

Fortunately, there are a few steps that can help you avoid analysis paralysis.

First, make sure you’ve gathered enough information. Often analysis paralysis happens because you simply don’t know enough to solve the problem. Instead of banging your head on your desk, step back and re-evaluate. Is there anything you might have missed?

Second, it may truly be the case be that you are simply left with two equally good options. In that situation, the best decision is… any decision! When all else is equal, list out the pros and cons, run your thoughts by a colleague you trust to make sure your thinking is clear, and then make a choice. Part of being a leader is making (and owning!) decisions like these.

Third, if you’re well and truly stuck, stop and take a deep breath. Step away for a bit. This may be a sign that you missed something important earlier.

• Reexamine your goals – it could be that you didn’t fully understand how your boss was describing the results she wanted.
• Look over your parameters – there might be a restriction in place that would easily strike out one of these seemingly equivalent options.
• Review your resources – is there anything you’ve missed? Do you have time, people, money, equipment, technology, mentors, or anything else you could draw from?

The hard truth

There isn’t always a solution.

At least, not one with the goals, parameters, and resources you’re working with. If the goals you’re working towards are truly critically important, this is the time to go back to your boss, outline your thinking, and clearly illustrate why you need the goals to change, restrictions to be lifted, or additional resources to be provided.

Your takeaway

Solving open-ended problems isn’t always easy, but following this four-step process can make it much more approachable. And remember, be patient – problem solving is a process, and it’s OK not to have an immediate solution.

To recap:

• Write down the end goal. Putting it in writing helps you process the problem and think more critically about the solution.
• Establish your limitations up front. Don’t waste time exploring solutions that won’t work.
• Take stock of your resources. Poor resource planning can leave you and your team feeling overwhelmed.
• Avoid analysis paralysis. If you’ve followed the steps above, you’ll be in a much better position to choose a satisfactory solution.
• Don’t be afraid to go back and reassess. You may be unable to find a solution because, based on the circumstances, there is no solution.

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In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the potential problems and risks of trying to reduce your safety costs.

We saw that cutting costs is a tricky thing to get right, and there are a lot of ways to make mistakes that can cost your institution big time.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, though. In most safety programs, there are plenty of opportunities to save money without sacrificing safety — if you know where to look.

First, a quick recap:

If you missed Part 1 of this series, we recommend pausing to read it first. To review:

• Safety costs aren’t just limited to the line items on your budget — you should also consider the potential cost of a lack of safety such as accidents, internal or external audits, investigations, fines, and reputational damage.
• When you add up these costs and risks, investing in safety makes good financial sense.
• The standard approaches to cost-cutting (like downsizing personnel, reducing training offerings, or holding off on purchasing new equipment) can actually increase risks to your people, finances, and reputation.
• Research safety should be a “cost saver” with the proper investment. “Cheaper” safety usually takes more time, which can increase your labor costs, offset any potential savings you might see, and increase risk.

Now, let’s explore a different approach — one that can help you limit spending while actually improving safety outcomes and compliance scores.

1. Increase efficiency

Let’s say your institution was looking to reduce its operating costs. One option would be to consider investing in energy efficiency upgrades, such as installing LED lighting and sealing leaks around windows.

Similarly, the trick to safely reducing safety costs is to uncover the inefficiencies and make them more efficient.

In most lab safety programs, the greatest inefficiencies are administrative tasks and data management. EHS professionals are wasting time pushing paper and manually keying in data. According to Gartner, the average worker wastes 20 to 30% of their work week — or 8 to 12 hours! — managing documents or document-based information. And that’s just your average worker. We’re all familiar with the huge, disparate datasets that most EHS professionals need to transcribe, QA, manipulate, and upkeep.

Imagine the impact all of those hours would have if they were allocated to important safety initiatives and building relationships with researchers instead of administrative work.

An investment in a quality lab safety software, for example, can demonstrably pay for itself. By giving back hours that would be spent on common safety tasks, good software can turbocharge your existing team and pick up the slack of anywhere from 1-2 full time employees (FTEs) in many cases.

2. Invest in continuity

Employee turnover and onboarding is another costly problem for EHS departments — and, fortunately, one that’s relatively easy to solve.

Without a safety management system in place, it takes a lot of time and money to get new employees up to speed. In fact, replacing a salaried employee can cost your institution 6-9 months of their annual salary, according to The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). For an employee making $60,000 per year, that’s $30,000-$45,000, just disappeared into thin air!

Not only is replacing employees costly in terms of onboarding and training, but there are “soft costs” as well. There’s no easy way to put a price on the knowledge that walks out the door when an employee leaves your safety team. When it comes to EHS, since so many institutions rely on outdated systems, often, a great deal of knowledge gets stored in one place — the employee’s own mind. They walk, and they leave with the only source of historical info about training, inspections, and processes. Giving new hires access to digitized information that they need to be effective in their job is critical for reducing their ramp up time.

By putting safety software in place that people actually want to use, you can ensure that this knowledge is safely stored within your institution — not in someone’s head.

3. Close safety gaps and reduce risk

It sounds like obvious advice (because honestly, it is!), but the best way to reduce the costs associated with an accident is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Say it with us now: “If you think safety is expensive, try an accident.”

With good safety software, your EHS team has visibility into research activities across all your labs. They’re able to see important information like job hazards, exposures, and training status in real-time. Armed with this information, they’re able to identify potential risks before they spiral out of control. What’s more, they can make informed decisions to allocate your safety resources where they’ll make the biggest impact.

In the event that an incident does occur, good software can help your team respond quickly and effectively. That’s key to minimizing damage to people and property, avoiding costly fines, preserving your reputation, and restoring investigators’ confidence in your institution so you can return to normal as soon as possible.

4. Relieve administrative burden for researchers

Aside from tangible costs, good software can give your institution a serious competitive advantage. How so?

Because it enables researchers to focus on their research. Without the burden of safety-related administrative tasks, researchers are free to do the work that matters — like writing grants, performing experiments, and securing patents. As a point of comparison to other systems, SciShield was found to reduce researcher’s time commitment by 60.5% on average. Ultimately, this means your researchers are able to concentrate on the things that bring money into your institution.

Your takeaway

• Cutting safety costs can be a tricky thing to get right, but there are opportunities for savings if you know where to look.
• Administrative burden is the greatest and most easily addressed source of costly inefficiencies in institutional EHS programs.
• Instead of increasing FTEs, invest in software tools that improve efficiency, reduce risk, and relieve administrative burden.
• By shifting your resources to software, you can ensure knowledge retention without sacrificing safety.

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Institutions are changing how they allocate budget. For many safety programs, that means one thing:

It’s time to sink or swim.

Upper management is increasingly requesting that you demonstrate not only how much value you add to your research program, but also what steps you’re taking to stay efficient.

So what’s changed here? University leaders are realizing that they can no longer simply hike tuition to cover rising costs, and they’re looking for new places for revenue generation. Unfortunately, they often turn their eyes to their research safety programs.

The good news is that if you play your cards right, you can turn that critical eye right on its head, obtaining more resources for you and your team. In our work with numerous universities, we’ve observed a few patterns that can help us understand this problem, as well as its potential solutions, and we want to share our knowledge with you.

In this article, we’ll set the stage by focusing on the risks of reducing a safety program’s budget (how not to do it). In our next piece, we’ll detail a few areas of focus you can cut back on that won’t introduce more risks.

Research safety: cost-center or cost-saver?

There’s a saying in the safety world: “If you think safety is expensive, try an accident.”

It’s no secret that research safety programs can be a major cost center for most universities. As we all know, it’s not simply a matter of purchasing PPE and conducting inspections (unless you are just looking to “check the box” on safety).

While accidents themselves can be costly, dealing with the ensuing investigation, fines, and corrective actions all have significant costs as well. If you’ve ever experienced an accident and the ensuing follow up, you know what we’re talking about.

A few statistics to consider:

• A single injury costs organizations on average $32,000 (National Safety Council Injury Facts 2014)
• A serious OSHA violation can carry a penalty of up to $13,260 (OSHA)
• Indirect costs such as investigations and administrative time related to an injury or illness can range from 1 to 4.5x direct costs (Stanford University)

Not only that, but the ensuing investigation may draw unwanted scrutiny and expose other flaws in your safety program. Over half (54%) of institutions say they do not have the ability to withstand a major reputational risk event, according to research by United Educators.

Then, of course, there’s the human side to all of this that too often gets overlooked. When it’s your job to protect the people at your institution, you understandably get upset, sad, worried, and angry when something happens. That emotional turmoil and stress doesn’t come for free. Often, it impacts your job performance, or incentivizes you to find a new job at an organization that values its safety program a little more highly.

When you add it all up, it’s clear that investing in safety makes good financial and reputational sense.

3 dangers of slashing your safety budget

Obviously, reducing funds from a critical area like safety is a tricky thing to get right.

On the one hand, you need to trim the fat from areas that add no value. On the other hand, you don't want to slash costs so much that you sacrifice safety and introduce a new risk in lack of coverage.

In some situations, the approach to cost-cutting is to downsize personnel, reduce professional enrichment, and hold off on purchasing new equipment. The irony is that this approach can actually end up increasing your risks and costing your institution more money in the long run.

1) Gambling with safety

The most obvious danger of reducing safety spending is the potential for people to get hurt.

Consider, for example, the now-infamous UCLA lab fire. Research assistant Sheri Sangji was transferring a syringe of tert-butyllithium when the chemical ignited. She was not wearing a lab coat and her clothing caught fire, resulting in severe burns that led to her death 18 days later.

Had Sheri had been wearing a fire-resistant lab coat, her burns might have been less severe. However, requisition forms from the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry show that fire-resistant lab coats were only ordered after the accident, at a cost of $45.05 each.

The ensuing court case cost UCLA nearly $4.5 million in legal fees alone — enough to buy 86,000 lab coats. If you keep waiting to improve things until someone else has an incident, it’s only a matter of time before your institution is the one that causes everyone else to start scrambling.

2) Short term gains cause long term pains

Even without a major accident, cost-cutting can do more harm than good. Replacing equipment less often or cutting back on professional development can help you save money in the short-term, but it can cost you in the long run.

When staff and students are forced to conduct research in outdated labs without adequate training and equipment that’s falling apart, research suffers. Another common but harmful source of cost-cutting? Investing in software that doesn't actually meet your needs. Since research is what brings money into your institution, this sets off a vicious cycle of cost-cutting that’s hard to recover from.

You might not notice a difference right away, but chipping away at your safety budget can seriously erode your entire research program’s foundation. It also shows your research community that you see safety as a cost, not an investment. If you do not take safety seriously, you cannot expect your researchers to either.

3) Fast, cheap, or good – you can only pick two

If you want a good safety program and you want it for less money, then you should expect to spend more time on safety tasks. Why? Because with fewer resources to get the work done, it ends up taking your safety team and researchers longer to complete tasks like data entry, audits, and reporting.

Think of it this way: you wouldn’t ask your groundskeeper to mow the university lawns with a push mower — it might save a few dollars up front, but it would be an enormous waste of resources over time (and likely increase the risk of a worker’s comp claim being filed for a related injury).

Similarly, when your safety team and researchers are asked to complete safety tasks with inefficient tools that frustrate them, their productivity suffers. What ends up happening is that the increased labor costs far outweigh any potential savings you might see from giving them the cheaper tools for the job.

Now, sometimes, doing something more slowly is an acceptable (and even desirable) solution. Not everything has to be done at a lighting pace, and acting like it does will quickly exhaust resources that could be put to good use elsewhere. However, for many safety-related activities, the exposure of risk is directly related to the amount of time it takes to complete the related task. This could be as simple as accessing critical safety data or closing out an inspection finding with a high risk lab.

We all know what can happen when risks are left unattended for too long.

Your takeaway

• Lab safety costs aren’t just limited to the line items on your budget — you should also consider the potential cost of a lack of safety such as accidents, internal or external audits, investigations, fines, and reputational damage.
• When you add up these costs and risks, investing in safety makes good financial sense.
• The standard approaches to cost-cutting (like downsizing personnel, reducing training offerings, or holding off on purchasing new equipment) can actually increase risks to your people, finances, and reputation.
• Research safety should be a “cost saver” with the proper investment. “Cheaper” safety usually takes more time, which can increase your labor costs, offset any potential savings you might see, and increase risk.

In Part 2, we look at some of the opportunities to save money without compromising on safety.

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Congratulations, your biotech company (or incubator) is finally taking off! Perhaps you've hired more researchers, increased your research space, or secured an additional round of funding.

Now is the best time to start thinking about how your safety and loss control programs will scale as well. Believe us when we say it can be a real nightmare to untangle if you leave it unaddressed for too long.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the challenges you can expect to face as you grow, as well as some signs that you might need to scale back the services provided by your safety consultant.

The question now is: how do you effectively manage safety, keep costs down, and prevent administrative burden from keeping you away from the activities that make you profitable?

First, a quick recap:

If you missed Part 1 of this series, we’d definitely recommend pausing to read it first. To recap, here are some common signs you’ve reached a point where safety consultants are no longer a good sole solution:

• Billable hours are increasing and you are questioning the total value
• People are cutting corners or only doing the bare minimum for safety
• Answering simple questions about logistics or safety is difficult
• Errors are becoming more common (and more costly)
• Safety feels like a burden and a time suck from other important tasks

Now, let’s explore some of the potential strategies available to you.

4 safety strategies for growing biotech companies

1. Take advantage of automation

One of the biggest challenges of running a growing biotech organization is that there simply aren’t enough people to do all the work that needs to get done. To hit your goals, everyone has to do the work of two or three employees. It’s why so many startups choose to hire safety consultants in the first place. And that totally makes sense as a starting point.

But even if your company is using a consultant, there ends up being a lot of overflow work that falls on researchers — especially during periods of growth. Things like closing out inspection findings, rectifying inventory, tracking reminders and communications, and maintaining logs are all examples of spillover tasks that can suck the energy out of researchers. Instead of focusing on their research, your team wastes valuable time on safety-related administrative tasks. And don't get us started on all those PDF's and Excel files. Yikes - lots of wasted time.

That’s where automation comes in. A quality software program equipped with automation functionality can perform many of the tedious tasks that slow your team down (and in most cases, it can do them faster and more accurately than a human).

For example, you can automate notification reminders for training, inspections, and many other safety administration tasks. When biosafety registrations expire or when training is due (or overdue!) a good system will send out a reminder without your safety consultants needing to lift a finger.

By outsourcing these tasks to a computer, you’ll be able to operate like a team twice your size — without the additional overhead. (What’s more, you’ll be able to easily scale without needing to revamp the whole thing — more on this further down).

2. Implement intuitive and proven systems

Biotech research is a cutting-edge environment, but your safety systems might still be stuck in the stone age. It doesn’t take much to imagine them weighing you down as you try to stride forward.

That’s a problem, because today’s employees expect the technologies they use at work to mirror those they use in their personal lives, with clean interfaces, matching colors, and a simple user experience. You know, software that doesn't suck.

In fact, 73% of employees say that the flexibility of tools (e.g., technology, apps, and devices) that they might need to use for work would influence their decision to apply or accept a position at a company, according to 2019 Digital Employee Experience Survey by VMware.

In short, companies that provide a positive digital experience are in a better position to attract and retain top talent. Not only that, but the survey also found that a positive digital experience is linked to company growth.

So what exactly makes a positive digital experience? According to survey respondents:

• The ability to access the apps and information they need
• The freedom to work from their own device
• The ability to work from anywhere as easily as from the office (which, in fairness, can sometimes be a big ask when operating in a lab environment)
• The opportunity to provide input on which technologies they use at work

When it comes to your safety tools, it’s clear that providing researchers and consultants with a system that supports them in doing their best work (and reducing unnecessary billable hours) is a win-win.

3. Integrate your chemical inventory and reporting

One of the biggest headaches (and sources of safety-related risk) for growing life science companies is chemical reporting. It’s a detail-oriented, labor intensive, complicated requirement. It weighs your team down, so reducing resource spend in this area yields big dividends.

In order to maintain an up-to-date chemical inventory alone, your team will often spend hours manually tracking down all the chemical containers in your lab’s inventory, cross-referencing regulations, calculating totals, and converting these amounts to the appropriate units.

If this time isn’t being spent on these tasks, that’s a big, frightening leading indicator that your chemical inventory could represent a major risk to your operations. If you’ve never been through an investigation for a laboratory accident, trust us, you don’t want to.

A good chemical inventory system, on the other hand, can take the information already stored in your chemical inventory and instantly generate complex reports. This two-pronged approach not only makes it easy for your chemical inventory to be kept up-to-date, but it re-uses the data present for other critical tasks, drastically cutting time investment.

With an integrated chemical inventory system, you can quickly prepare a state-specific report like California Environmental Reporting System (CERS), New York City Right-to-Know (NYC RTK), or Nevada Right-to-Know. Not only that, but you can quickly compare your inventory to regulatory limits like fire codes and MAQ's — say, if you're moving to a new location.

An integrated platform saves you from having a disjointed chemical inventory and reporting system. That saves you valuable time, money, and provides you with reduced risk and more freedom to focus on what matters — building your company to greater heights.

4. Choose solutions that scale with you

If you’re a growing biotech company, you’ve probably already expanded your team and opened additional lab spaces — or you will soon. There’s also a good chance you’re still being weighed down by the same legacy safety compliance systems.

Unfortunately, solutions that worked well enough when you were smaller quickly and dangerously break down when you start adding more employees and research tasks. The risk from this situation comes when safety administration infrastructure isn’t updated along with everything else as you grow. It only takes one incident to cause a disproportionate amount of burden and hardship, and more often than not, a missed safety requirement will be at the root of the problem.

Spreadsheets are a classic example of this. When you’re only tracking a few pieces of research equipment, spreadsheets are a common and workable solution. But when you’re tracking dozens of pieces of equipment across multiple locations, things spiral out of control quickly.

This is particularly true as your data points multiply exponentially across many trainings, inspections, and hazards across many people, places, and groups (just wait until you get your own building, if you don’t have one yet).

When you’re running lean, it can be hard to carve out resources for safety technology. A better way to understand your hesitancy to invest in safety software: you can’t afford to waste the budget you do have on short-lived software systems you’ll outgrow in a year. You’d honestly be better off sticking to pen, paper, and Excel than to pick the “cheap software that’s better than nothing.”

A better solution: invest in flexible, scalable laboratory safety compliance software that will grow with you. Good software should support you whether you have 10 researchers in one location, or 1,000 researchers in 20 locations.

Look for systems that give you the flexibility to configure things differently as you scale — such as the ability to add modules for new functionality as your needs develop. Setting up custom permissions is also a very important consideration as you grow and add spaces, buildings, and sites in different locations.

By using scalable software, you’ll be able to keep costs down. Not only that, you’ll save a tremendous amount of time searching for, evaluating, and implementing new solutions.

Make smart investments in safety software early, and you’ll be thanking yourself years down the line while your peers invest an enormous quantity of resources to overcome their technical and administrative debt.

Key takeaways

• By leveraging modern lab safety tools and systems, you can scale safely and ensure your long-term success.
• Your software tools should support scientists and consultants alike in doing their best work.
• When you’re strapped for cash, it’s even more important that you select the right tools rather than wasting time and money on a jumble of inefficient systems that open you up to risk and wasted time for your high performing team members.

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When you're first starting out, safety consultants are often a great solution to manage risk and compliance while still running lean.

Offloading these tasks can allow you to focus your resources on progressing research and securing funding without sacrificing safety. When it comes to research, speed wins.

But for many biotech companies, there comes a point where entirely outsourcing safety no longer makes sense. The big question: when does this point occur? In this article, we’ll provide you with some guiding thoughts to help you find an answer. In Part 2, we discuss sustainable solutions for scaling.

As your organization experiences significant growth, it’s worth a second look to make sure these relationships (and the tools you’re using) are still the smartest solution for your company, your researchers, and your bottom line. Often times, just cranking up the billable hours with your consulting firm decreases the value you are getting from them.

Growing pains: Common challenges of scaling up

All companies experience growing pains, but biotech companies face a number of unique challenges.

For one, there’s the sheer pace of growth. Biotechnology is the second fastest growing industry in the U.S, according to a Fundera analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), market research firms, and investment firms.

Growth is a good thing, but it also means your safety responsibilities grow too (in many cases, just as quickly as your research grows). Seemingly overnight, you might find yourself with additional employees to manage, regulatory hurdles to clear, reporting requirements to meet, and a need to do all of this without impacting productivity.

At the same time, you may outgrow your research space or need to set up additional labs and work areas. Not only do you need to make sure the new space can accommodate all of your employees, but you also have to think about the kinds of equipment and chemicals the building will need to support (in many cases, without clear answers to these questions, a building won’t allow you to move in).

If you’re not organized, that can be a painful process. Fire code restrictions on the quantities of hazardous materials that can be used and stored in your new facility can be especially problematic. It’s not uncommon for companies to get deep into the process of a move and then find out the space can’t accommodate all the chemicals you needed to carry out your research.

Despite the breakneck pace of growth, the safety management systems you’re using probably haven’t evolved as quickly. Many organizations still use a hodgepodge of ad hoc tools and informal processes from the earlier days. Unfortunately, a system that worked well when you had 20 employees is a nightmare with over 100. It can even seem like implementing a new system is an overwhelming prospect in the face of all the work that still needs to be done.

The net result is that consultants and researchers alike spend far too much time on safety-related administrative tasks. Many organizations at this stage spend quite a bit of time hemorrhaging resources trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Can anyone really be surprised when your research suffers and fees climb out of control?

5 signs you’ve outgrown your safety consultant

By now, you may be seeing some of your own struggles described in the scenario above. If you’re experiencing some of these challenges already, how do you know when you’ve reached a point where relying solely on consultants is no longer a good sole solution?

Here are some of the most common symptoms:

1) Billable hours are increasing

The most obvious sign that you’ve outgrown your consultant is that billable hours are increasing and still don’t cover your safety compliance needs. Alternatively, your needs may be met, but the price tag is starting to reach unsustainable levels. It's important to have open discussions with your consultants to ask them where you can gain efficiencies to keep hours down.

There are a few reasons this could be happening. It may be that your requirements have grown beyond the original scope of your consulting agreement. Or, it could be that the systems your consultant is using have hit their upper limits. If your consultant can’t work efficiently, this will result in a great deal of otherwise-avoidable billable hours.

This might be the time to consider ways to supplement your consulting services with a new software solution (which we’ll discuss in part 2 of this series).

2) People are cutting corners or only doing the bare minimum for safety

This one is usually much more subtle. You might notice researchers skipping safety practices like donning protective gear or completing a risk assessment. Or, you might start to see people tuning out or rolling their eyes during your safety training meetings.

It’s not that your researchers don’t care about safety. More often, these shortcuts are an indication of a broader system problem — one that can’t simply be outsourced to a consultant. When researchers avoid safety tasks they know they “should” be doing, it’s frequently because they aren’t bought into the idea that the safety processes in place are there to actually protect them.

The biggest cause for this feeling? Simple administrative burden. The more researchers feel like safety is there as a protection for the company, and not a protection for them, the more they will avoid it. Make safety clear and simple, and researchers are much more likely to engage in the task.

3) Answering simple questions is difficult

Want to know whether inspections are overdue or stalled out? Or where flammable liquids are stored in your lab? Good luck. (No, we mean it – good luck). When you begin outgrowing your current consultants, it may take days for them to get back to you. What’s more, it’s not enough to have an answer, you have to ask yourself how confident you are in the data you are receiving and whether it is out of date.

You might think your consultant is too busy, or simply not prioritizing your work. From a different perspective, these problems are often the result of an overstressed system for tracking and managing safety needs. Your consultants are likely doing their best, but they often shy away from digitizing data due to the nature of their service model. This is where a combination of technology and great consultants can drive new efficiencies.

When your researchers and consultants don’t have the right systems in place to collect and share information, you’re going to have trouble answering even the simplest questions — and the problem will only get worse with time. Especially for all of the specific needs of chemical inventory, it's critical to make sure you're getting a good system that will serve your needs as you scale. Are you still looking at stagnant PDF's and Excel files? If so, it might be time to explore where technology can help.

4) Errors are becoming more common (and more costly)

It may have started out with your noticing the occasional mistake on your chemical inventory (or, if we’re being honest, it may have always been that way). But after growing, these types of errors start feeling like the expected norm rather than the exception. It may even be harder to dismiss that little knot in the back of your mind that there exists the possibility for a serious incident.

Inaccurate inventory, missing training, overdue lab safety inspections, out-of-date equipment are more than an annoyance — they’re an early warning that the systems you’re using to manage safety are failing or are too manual to get the job done right.

It is critical to act at this stage, as these issues will quickly compound and leave you with an overwhelming amount of administrative debt. If left unchecked, these seemingly small mistakes can also lead to serious accidents and costly fines down the road. The longer you wait to address these issues, the more time and more expense it will take to fix them.

If you’re working in a shared space or an incubator, an incident may cause you to lose the right to operate there, depending on how the ensuing investigation goes.

5) Safety feels like a expensive burden

The whole point of outsourcing safety tasks is to ease the burden of administrative tasks on yourself and your researchers. With these tasks off their plate, they’re able to focus on the activities that make the company profitable and allow you to scale.

But when you start outgrowing your consulting relationship, your team ends up taking on tasks that your consultant doesn’t have the allocated time (or budget) to do. Instead of focusing on their research, they spend their time hunched over paperwork.

If you're starting to hear grumbles about safety tasks or chemical inventory management from your researchers, it's usually a sign that your consultant can no longer keep up with the demands of your growing company for the scope of work you have agreed to. And if you don't address these complaints quickly (with more money), it can breed resentment about safety, which will only make things worse and harder to scale.

Your next steps

If you’ve started to notice any of these signs, it probably means you’re outgrowing your safety consultant. That doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t still play a valuable role in your organization, but it might mean you need to change your approach to supplement their work.

Before you pull the plug, you might consider talking to your consultant about the challenges you’re experiencing. Chances are they’ve witnessed similar situations at other companies, and may be able to suggest potential solutions.

Our next post addresses some of these solutions and provides you with ideas to help you effectively manage safety, keep costs down, and prevent administrative burden from hindering your growth and success.

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Last year alone, organizations in the U.S. invested $87.6 billion in employee training. The majority of those funds were devoted to authoring and delivering training content.

Yet, that’s just one aspect of an effective training program.

In the same way that a doctor would (or at least, should) never prescribe you medication without a thorough understanding of your personal history and symptoms, an effective training program requires much more than blindly assigning coursework. A modern training program should help you understand the challenges your organization faces and the solutions available to meet them.

So what does a modern training program look like, and how do you achieve it? Let’s take a closer look.

Identify training needs and allocate resources

Before you even begin thinking about creating and delivering content, you need to know who’s actually working in your labs and what hazards they face. Which researchers are handling teratogenic materials? Who might be exposed to radiation? What training is available for these hazards?

To do this, you’ll need to move beyond binders, spreadsheets, and software that feels like it was made during the 90s. It’s time to start using modern software that tracks not only the courses you have available, but also who’s employed at your organization and which hazards they’re working with.

Imagine how much more powerful your course content would be if you could see every hazard researchers encounter in your labs. Interactions with individual researchers would be that much more personalized if you knew exactly what each person was working on. The efficiency of your training efforts would multiply if you could effortlessly match available training to each researcher’s individual needs without drowning your team in soul-crushing busywork. It’s all possible with a modern training program.

Monitor and measure performance

In the past, something as simple as finding out who’s had the appropriate training and when could take hours. You had to obtain a list of everyone who works in a specific lab, locate their training records, and manually go through each record to see when they completed the training (if they completed it at all). And hope on a wing and a prayer that the information you’re looking at is actually accurate and you’re not about to harass someone for missing a training they actually completed weeks ago.

Today, modern training systems put all this information at your fingertips. Dashboards display training activity and compliance snapshots, helping you discover trends across your organization. You can access detailed reports for each building, group, or lab. Drill down on a specific course, such as Biosafety Level 2 (BSL2) Basic Training, to see compliance percentages, specific researchers who’ve taken the course, and which labs or groups they belong to. You can also drill down to see who’s overdue and pinpoint specific courses or groups that need your immediate attention. All of this can be done in just a couple of clicks.

What’s more, is that a modern training system will help you discover costly unknown unknowns - the things you don’t know you don’t know. It’s precisely this sort of unknown unknowns that turn into the biggest problems, the largest sources of risk, and the most harmful incidents. And it’s your job as a safety professional, risk manager, or leader to shore up as many of these unknown unknowns as possible before they lead to reputational, personal, or financial damage.

Armed with that knowledge, you can make smarter and more informed decisions to protect your researchers and your organization from harm.

Automate time-consuming tasks

As a safety professional, compiling delinquency reports or nagging researchers to complete training simply isn’t the best use of your time. Not only that, it’s easy to forget to follow up, in which case you end up with researchers who are not properly trained for the hazards they encounter.

What’s more, the populations in labs and groups are constantly shifting, as are the hazards those individuals are working with. Keeping records accurate is often impossible, or would require so much time to accomplish that it would be unjustifiable. Either way, you end up making decisions with data you know is outdated and inaccurate.

In a modern training program, these arduous tasks are handled by software instead. For example, you can set training requirements for each researcher, automatically send email reminders to complete training, and notify researchers when they’re overdue so they can remedy delinquencies quickly. The best part? The data in the system will be kept up to date automatically, so you can trust that actions are being taken with the most accurate information available.

One quick way to tell if your safety program isn’t performing at its potential peak: are you spending any time or money on following up on training reminders/delinquency follow up? We aren’t joking when we say that those oft-tedious tasks should cost you literally 0 hours and $0.

Instead of being chained to your computer, you’re free to do the work that really matters, like designing training content or personally connecting with researchers. You may even get enough time to enjoy your morning coffee before it gets cold (we won’t tell).

Consistent training information across your organization

Traditionally, organizations maintained separate training spreadsheets or binders for each training course, lab, or researcher.

This led to a number of problems. If a researcher changed labs or groups, their training records didn’t always go with them. It was hard to see whether everyone in a specific lab had the appropriate training for all the equipment and hazards they might encounter. And there was no easy way to get a complete picture of your organization’s training compliance.

A modern training program allows you to store training records in one central location as researchers move between laboratories and groups. Detailed and accurate training records and history stick with researchers, even as they move around your organization. Ideally, a program like this would be able to integrate with your organization’s user directory to effortlessly keep up with all of the personnel changes that take place. Someone changes a name or gets married? No problem (but they do still have to complete their safety training). This way, there is total clarity into whether is properly trained, safe, and in compliance. With this level of transparency, everyone can work together to improve safety outcomes.

Drive continuous improvement — not just compliance

Training is about so much more than just checking a box. The ultimate goal is to create a safe environment for research. Yet only 38% of managers believe their training programs meet their learners' needs, according to a 2015 survey by the Association for Talent Development.

In short, organizations need to do a better job of creating and delivering valuable, relevant content that addresses researcher challenges.

Unfortunately, when you're buried under compliance tasks, it's easy to feel like you don't have enough time to improve your training program. If you're in this position, you do your best to put out fires as they spring up, but you can never really get ahead.

That all changes with a modern training system that takes the admin tasks off your plate. Suddenly, you have time to get out in the field and connect with researchers. You get to have those teachable moments like questions, comments, and natural discussions, that turn back into structured training opportunities and ultimately improve your training program. While you may or may not have the budget to get all the training courses you’d like ordered or created, you will have much more time to better understand your researchers’ needs and uncover any unmet gaps that would greatly benefit from a little TLC.

Key takeaways

• A modern training program, which allows safety professionals to adapt training to changing needs and go beyond "checking a box", is key to a safer and more productive research environment.
• Creating a modern training program isn’t as simple as delivering coursework online. To truly achieve a modern training program, organizations need to take a more holistic approach.
• A modern training program should rely on a Single Source of Truth, and leverage that information to drive automation.
• By investing in the right technology, organizations can free up their team to focus on more valuable tasks that contribute to safety improvements.

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Few things make your heart race and your palms sweat quite like the arrival of a regulator at your organization. What's even more nerve-wracking is that it usually happens when you're least expecting it.

While you don’t necessarily know when your next audit will be or what questions a regulator will ask, there are a few things you can do to make sure you’re prepared.

To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of 5 items nearly every auditor will be looking for when they visit your organization.

Spend some time with this list to help you get comfortable with what you might be asked, what auditors really want to see, and what you can do to prove that you’re prepared.

First impressions are key

During an audit or an investigation, regulators are examining you and your organization — not just your chemical inventory.

Can you imagine if you showed up to an interview 15 minutes late, wearing ripped jeans and sneakers, and forgot to bring a copy of your resume? A hiring manager isn't just listening to your answers; they're looking to see that you have your act together.

Similarly, a regulator isn't solely looking at your chemical labeling, or whatever the particular audit item may be. They're also looking to see that you’ve got a good handle on your chemical inventory and safety program.

What auditors (anyone, really) experience in the first few minutes of meeting you will shape their opinion of you — and once those judgments are made, they're very hard to change.

Your entire audit will go much more smoothly if you're able to start off by answering questions quickly, completely, and with accuracy and confidence.

1. Is your inventory up to date?

One of the first things most auditors look for is whether your inventory is up-to-date. Are all the chemicals on your shelves accounted for? Are the amounts and locations correct?

Without an accurate inventory, your entire chemical safety program suffers. You can't accurately report on hazards because you don't actually know which chemicals are on-site. You can't train people to avoid those hazards because you don't have record that they exist. And if those chemicals have regulatory limits — which many do — there's no way to know whether those limits are exceeded.

To regulators, an out-of-date inventory is an indicator of a bigger systemic problem. If your inventory isn’t being updated regularly, it’s likely other things have fallen by the wayside as well.

To get your inventory in order, you must develop protocols and train employees to ensure that new chemicals are entered immediately, expired or used-up chemicals are removed, and chemicals are tracked when they move locations.

You also need to make sure you’re using the right tools for the job. Excel isn’t usually up to task, so using a good chemical inventory software can actively reduce the amount of work you need to do.

2. Is your inventory readily available for first responders?

Around 1% of chemical incidents result in injuries to first responders, according to the Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health. With that in mind, nearly every auditor will want to see that your inventory is not only up-to-date but also easily accessible to firefighters, police, and emergency medical personnel.

In the event of a fire, for example, firefighters need to see what hazards are present before they enter your building. Are there water reactive chemicals? Where are they located, and in what quantities? The longer it takes to access this information, the slower the response will be, resulting in more property damage and loss.

Not only can a hard-to-reach inventory delay an emergency response, it can also put first responders in danger. Failing to account for chemicals or their locations can have serious — even fatal — consequences for emergency personnel and laboratory workers.

Your chemical inventory data should be organized in a way that enables you to quickly retrieve information for first responders. That includes the ability to locate a specific lab, see major hazard categories at a glance, types of materials people are working with, and drill down on specific chemical locations and quantities.

3. Are Safety Data Sheets (SDS's) easily accessible?

This is another frequently-cited issue, and one you can be sure a regulator will be looking for.

Again, regulators want to see that you’ve done your due diligence to protect people from chemical hazards, so you should be able to show that safety data sheets are readily available (and if not? You should absolutely correct this even if there’s not an audit coming in).

First, make sure current SDS’s are present for all chemicals on hand. Then, double check that your system actually allows users to quickly search and find what they need in an instant.

Some organizations keep SDS’s in a binder in a central location, such as a cabinet in each lab space. Or, they keep them in folders on a computer. But the best way to accomplish this is with an electronic SDS database that is integrated with your chemical inventory. The use of an electronic SDS database is not only accepted but encouraged by chemical regulators.

4. Are chemicals labeled correctly?

Along the same lines, auditors will be concerned with ensuring that chemical containers are correctly marked with the identity of the chemical and appropriate hazard information.

Unfortunately, labels have a tendency to get wet, peel, or rub off over time. Or, researchers decant chemicals into smaller containers and never label them in the first place. In any case, you’re left scratching your head about what’s in that container — and that’s the last thing you want during an inspection.

Start by training researchers on the importance of labeling, including who is responsible for maintaining labels, how to label decanted chemicals and aliquots, and what to do if they come across an unlabeled container. Then, follow up your training with periodic checks and self-inspections to get ahead of labeling issues long before an inspector arrives.

5. Are chemicals stored properly?

This is a tough question, but one you can count on being asked.

Improperly stored chemicals can spill, leak, break, react with other chemicals, expose people to harm, explode or catch fire. In fact, improper storage of flammable liquids is the leading cause of industrial fires. As a result, many federal, state, and local regulations have very specific guidelines for chemical storage.

Regulators want to know that you're not only storing chemicals properly, but that you have procedures in place to ensure these guidelines are followed at all times.

For example, do you check for incompatible chemical storage on your regular safety inspections? Are there signs in storage areas reminding researchers of important storage considerations? Is chemical storage part of your researcher training? Are you properly documenting inspection findings and resolutions? All of these signal to regulators that you’re committed to proactively creating a safe research environment.

Staying prepared for a potential visit by a regulator may seem like a daunting task, but in many cases, if you’re doing a great job at managing safety, the presence of a regulator shouldn’t cause too much undue stress. If there’s still that constant fear of a regulator dropping by, it may be time to reexamine whether you need a better system for helping you manage risk and safety effectively. Your stress should be just enough to get you out of bed in the morning, but not keep you up at night.

Your takeaway

• A big part of a successful regulatory visit or inspection is making a good first impression by being prepared, organized, transparent, and knowing what is expected of you.
• Before your next inspection, spend some time reviewing common inspection questions and practicing how you will address them (don’t forget to bookmark this article!).
• Centralized software training, lab safety inspections, and a good chemical inventory management system can all make your next regulatory visit less stressful.

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