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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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When it comes to enterprise software, hosted solutions have become one of the most popular choices. In fact, a whopping 94% of organizations use at least one hosted application and 73% of organizations say nearly all of their apps will be hosted by 2020.

Although you probably already use at least one hosted solution, you may not know it by that name. Or, you may have heard of hosted solutions before, but you’re wondering what exactly they are and why they’re so popular.

Whether you’re in the market for new software and want to understand the importance of digitizing EHS, or just want to learn more about the solutions that are available, SciShield is here to help. We’ve put together this guide to give you a brief overview of what hosted solutions are, and the advantages they offer to you and your organization.

What is a hosted solution?

In simple terms, a hosted solution is software that can be accessed from an outside provider through an internet connection. Unlike traditional software, there’s nothing to download or install — you just open your web browser and log in. Hosted solutions are sometimes referred to as software as a service (SaaS), cloud-based software, or on-demand software (although there can be important differences between these categories).

The rise of hosted solutions

By now you’re probably thinking: “OK, sure, I’ve used hosted solutions before.” In fact, you’ve probably used at least one hosted solution today.

If you logged in to Facebook, created a document in Microsoft Office 365, send a message with Gmail, or uploaded a file to Dropbox, then you’ve used a hosted solution. Today, hosted solutions are so widely available, it’s easy to forget that wasn’t always the case.

In the not-so-distant past, software came on a disc that had to be installed on each individual computer. You paid full price for individual licenses that gave you minimal-to-no tech support alongside very limited feature updates. Thank goodness we are past those dark times.

Understandably, there were a lot of problems with this delivery model for both customers and vendors. Each time a new version came out, you had to repurchase the entire software just to get the new features. Plus, if you ran into a problem, tech support and maintenance cost extra.

For vendors, the pricing model didn’t match the realities of creating, maintaining, and improving software. So, in order to be profitable, they had to overcharge you on the initial purchase to make sure ongoing developments were covered. It was a lose-lose all around.

Since then, hosted solutions have become the most popular method for software delivery. Gartner estimates the market will be worth $85B by the end of 2019 — up from $58B just two years ago.

Benefits of hosted solutions

It’s no surprise hosted solutions have become so popular, since they offer several distinct advantages over traditional software. It comes down three big things: cost, quality, and ongoing maintenance. Let’s look at each one in more detail.

Hosted solutions have a lower cost of use

The biggest advantage of hosted solutions is how affordable they are.

With traditional non-hosted software, the initial purchase fee is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll also have to purchase servers and network security hardware, hire IT staff to support and maintain the application, and pay for server room space and utilities. This can easily double or triple your ownership costs.

With a hosted solution, you trade these unpredictable costs for a flat monthly or annual subscription fee. This fee covers access to the software, as well as ‘extras’ like upgrades, support, security, and maintenance — everything you need to be successful.

Hosted solutions offer higher quality

Not only does the “pay-as-you-go” model make software more affordable, it also makes it possible for vendors to deliver a better product.

Instead of waiting two or three years to release a new version (and locking everyone else into waiting years for new features), hosted solution vendors continuously update and improve their product based on feedback from their customers. And you get access to these updates immediately without buying an upgrade package.

As part of your subscription, you'll also get access to a dedicated support team. Dedicated support agents are 100% focused on one software system, and are trained specifically to provide support on that product.

Imagine picking up the phone and being connected directly to a specialist who can investigate your problem and solve technical issues quickly. What’s more, this agent can communicate directly with the development team — who’s likely in the next cubicle over — so they can tackle the problem.

Hosted solutions also offer better security than most organizations can afford on their own. That’s because the costs are shared between all customers who use the solution. This is huge, because staying on top of and implementing trends and best practices in cybersecurity is a massively resource-intensive responsibility. Leave an issue unaddressed, and it can have huge negative ramifications for your organization.

When it comes to cybersecurity, it’s almost always better to just leave it to the experts and rest easy knowing you don’t need to worry about it any more. Encryption, vulnerability management, and intrusion detection and prevention are just a few of the standard security features most hosted solutions offer.

What's more, hosted solutions are an important element to creating and maintaining a Single Source of Truth, which can often be a gamechanger in keeping up with the pace of research data generation.

Hosted solutions are easier to maintain

As we mentioned above, hosted solutions work out to be cheaper because you don’t waste money on servers and additional IT resources, but have you stopped to think about how beneficial that could be?

First, there’s no physical and virtual infrastructure to manage and maintain. That includes servers, server rooms, data centers, networking systems, and firewalls, to name a few. All you need is a computer and an internet connection. And if something doesn’t work, the responsibility to fix it doesn’t land on your shoulders in the middle of a busy day.

When you run into a bug or glitch, you don’t have to slog through your organization’s IT ticketing system to get it fixed. That’s a big advantage, considering internal support teams receive an average of 492 support tickets a month, and most take about 28.7 hours to provide a first response, according to support guru Zendesk. Technology hosting companies, on the other hand, have the lowest first response time (19.3 hours) of any industry by a wide margin.

What about installing updates? The vendor deploys updates directly to their servers, saving your IT department the headache of downloading and upgrading your local system.

Maintaining data security is another area where hosted solutions come out on top.

Think about it: When your IT team is juggling 492 support tickets a month, they don’t have time to investigate security flaws, identify vulnerabilities, and write patches to resolve issues. They’re just frantically firefighting to address the biggest issues, leaving most of the other problems unaddressed indefinitely. In contrast, hosted solutions are monitored around the clock to head off potential threats, and place a strong priority on resolving all issues in as short a time possible (and prize good communication about ticket resolution as well).

In short, there are no servers for you to monitor and manage, no IT or development teams you need to coordinate, no hardware you have to install or update, and no security fixes you need to research and apply.

By outsourcing all these tasks to the software vendor, you have the freedom to focus on what you do best. If you stop for a moment and spend a few minutes with a pen and paper, it’s likely you could even brainstorm up a few big benefits of hosted solutions that we haven’t had the time to mention here.

Key takeaways

Whether you’re discussing solutions with a vendor or talking to your IT team, it can feel like software has a language all its own. By using this guide, you'll be better equipped to understand your options and communicate effectively.

We’ve given you a lot to chew on, so here’s a quick recap:

• Hosted solutions — also sometimes referred to as cloud-based software as a service (SaaS), cloud-based software, or on-demand software — are software applications can be accessed from an outside provider through a web browser.
• Hosted solutions have transformed the world of software, and for good reason: they offer many advantages for organizations that want to lower IT costs and operate efficiently.
• Hosted solutions are typically more affordable, better quality, and easier to maintain than traditional software systems.

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A robust chemical database forms the foundation of a good chemical inventory system. It acts as both the skeleton and the brain, providing structure and information critical to higher-order tasks like reporting.

In order to get the most out of your chemical inventory software, you'll need to look for a system powered by a quality chemical database. In this article, we’ll share some important features of a good chemical database you can be on the lookout for as you try to determine if a chemical inventory system is the right fit for you.

Why is a chemical database so important?

To understand why a chemical database is so important, let's back up a moment: Imagine your organization is undergoing some renovations, or you have a regulator coming for a visit and you need to calculate the total amounts of chemicals in a particular control area or zone.

Without a chemical database, this would be an extremely labor-intensive task. You’d need to:

1. Locate all the chemicals stored in these locations
2. Cross-reference the chemical names with the IBC regulation and manually assign hazard classifications to each one
3. Figure out much of each substance you have (including mixtures…)
4. Convert these amounts to the appropriate units (cubic feet or gallons. Thanks, imperial system.)
5. Compare the totals to applicable limits
6. Double check everything to make sure the information you gathered is accurate and complete, transcribed with high fidelity, and all calculations were performed and recorded correctly

A good chemical database solves this problem by putting all the chemical information you need at your fingertips — including chemical names and synonyms, amounts (counting mixtures), hazard details, regulatory implications, and applicable limits.

If your chemical database can’t easily perform a critical task like this, chances are you (and your organization!) deserve something better.

So, what makes a quality chemical database?

Of course, chemical databases can vary widely in their features and functionality — and not every chemical inventory system will even come with a built-in database.

Here are 6 things to look for in a quality chemical database:

1. Hazard data is integrated into the database and tied to specific chemicals

Integrating hazard data with your chemical inventory gives you full visibility into where hazardous chemicals are located without having to toggle between different systems. Chemicals and their associated hazards can be viewed side by side, and you can quickly search for chemicals by hazard class within a single workflow.

For example, you can search your entire organization or specific buildings for compressed flammable gases. Find out who has them, what kind, and how much. This enables managers to stay on top of risks, and researchers to get instant information about the chemicals in their workspace.

2. It returns search results quickly

It might not seem like a few chemical lookups would have much impact on your day, but the time spent staring at the spinning cursor waiting for results to load can quickly add up (especially if you have some days with hundreds of searches).

If the system takes ages to retrieve information and ties up your computer, you’ll find yourself tapping your foot and cursing under your breath each time you need to perform a search. In fact, you might find it easier to scroll and locate the information yourself.

Faster search speed means less time getting frustrated and waiting for answers, and more time focusing on your actual work.

3. It actually helps you find what you’re looking for

A single chemical can go by many different names. For example, the well-known chemical rubbing alcohol is also known as 2-propanol, propyl alcohol, isopropanol, and isopropyl alcohol. It can also be abbreviated as IPA (beer lovers beware).

With as many as 85,000 known toxic chemicals in use today, it’s impossible to keep track of all these different names and abbreviations. Often, people only know a chemical by its common name, or only know part of the name. Other times, they know the chemical name but are unsure of the spelling. In any case, it can be difficult to locate the right chemical information, which can lead to errors, omissions, or duplications.

A good chemical database assists with chemical lookup by bringing up predictions as you type in the search bar (similar to a Google search). It also gives you synonyms for each chemical, so you can quickly find all of the possible naming variations and abbreviations. At the same time, this ensures that one chemical entered into the system under two or more different names is still saved under a single record. Preventing these sorts of duplication errors ahead of time will also save you an enormous amount of work down the road.

This one is particularly critical for rapidly-growing smaller companies that need a sustainable chemical inventory solution If your solution doesn't have data that is interconnected, any burden present is going to be amplified and hold you back even more.

4. It’s not just a garbage dump of chemicals

With tens of thousands of known chemicals, it might seem like a good idea to add as many records as possible to your database. Unfortunately, it is extremely challenging to maintain quality of information when droves of new data suddenly find their way in.

Indiscriminately adding chemicals and information from the internet can result in thousands of superfluous and low-quality records that slow your system down and make it more difficult to maintain. Often, uncurated data sets have duplicate or incomplete entries that can confuse users and thwart your attempts to keep your chemical inventory accurate .

A quality chemical database strikes the balance between 'too much' and 'not enough' information, with each chemical added for a reason. As a rule of thumb, the system should contain 90-98% of the chemicals you'd find in most research organizations, as well as facilities chemicals like paints and cleaning products. This can only be accomplished by a team or individual who finds, organizes, and carefully adds chemical information hand-picked for your industry.

5. You can trust that the information is accurate

When it comes to chemical information, accuracy is everything. Small differences like a methyl group can cause big differences when it comes to hazard information. That’s why it’s so important that you feel confident that the information in your chemical database is correct.

There are many reasons a database might contain bad data. . A database designed for chemists looking for physical properties, thrown together from a collection of product catalogues, or blindly thrown together from SDS’s only gives you fragmented or incomplete information.

A database that’s built for chemical inventory goes deeper — giving you multiple layers of insight that help you locate the information you need. You can see chemical names, CAS numbers, regulatory information, fire code limits, and hazard details for chemicals at your organization.

6. It is regularly updated

The list of known chemicals and their hazards grows every day. Even if the database you use starts out accurate, it will need to be updated as new chemicals and revised safety information for existing chemicals is received.

With some databases, the burden of updating chemical information falls on your organization. Locating and entering all this data is no small task. Ideally, you should look for a system where the vendor is responsible for updating the database. That way your team is free to focus on more valuable tasks.

Another key consideration: As new chemicals, hazards, and regulations are added, it’s important to ensure that standards for database information are upheld. For example, when updated chemical safety information is added, old data needs to be removed. Otherwise, you could end up with two entries for the same chemical — which makes it difficult to know if you’re looking at the correct information and can lead to serious errors.

Key takeaways

• A quality chemical database is a prerequisite for an effective chemical inventory system.
• To be useful, hazard and regulatory data must be easily searchable and integrated alongside your chemical inventory.
• Integrating hazard data with an intuitive chemical inventory system drastically reduces the amount of time and resources needed when it comes time for complex regulatory reports.
• Look for a database that is hand-curated by chemical and regulatory experts to ensure each entry is relevant, accurate, and up-to date.

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No one starts a project expecting to fail. Or... do they?

Three quarters of business and IT executives anticipate their software projects may be doomed from the start, according to a study published by software development firm Geneca.

While it’s true that large-scale software implementations require a significant investment of time and resources, and there are plenty of opportunities for setbacks, there’s no reason your next software implementation shouldn’t be an unequivocal success.

After guiding our customers through well over 100 successful software implementations, we’ve identified seven factors that can make — or break — a project.

Keep the following questions in mind when discussing implementation with potential vendors, and you’ll stop yourself from becoming just another bad statistic.

7 boxes to check for software implementation success

1. Is there a specialized implementation team, including an experienced implementation project manager?

A successful software implementation always starts with the right people. No matter how good your software is, not having a specialized implementation team and project manager will cause your implementation to suffer — and fast.

In order to be effective, the implementation team needs to know your organization, your project, and your objectives inside and out. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time bringing a new person up to speed every time you encounter a problem and need to ask a question.

One easy thing to check for — does your implementation team have a background that makes sense for the project at hand? Are there people on the team with a background in research and science, and do they have a number of successful implementations already under their belt? Do they provide best practices based on success in previous implementations? Are they good at helping you navigate tough but important conversations without feeling like a confrontation is an inevitability?

2. Are success criteria defined from the start?

Ever heard the saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else”? Without a clear picture of your end goals, it will be very difficult to know whether your implementation is headed for success.

Success looks different for everyone, so it’s important to define what matters to your organization specifically. While the overarching goal of licensing software is to increase productivity and reduce costs, that can mean different things to different organizations. For example, it could mean decreasing the time researchers spend on administrative tasks, increasing the number of on-time reports, or shortening the duration of inspection and audit preparation.

Finally, visualizing success shouldn’t be a one-time thing. For the same reason that a good pep talk can bring life to a tired team, talking with your implementation team to review what success will look like can help give you that extra boost when you need it.

By taking the time to define what’s important for each role and user persona — not just for the leadership team — you can ensure that everyone involved in the project is bought in. And since this may be a new exercise for you, your implementation team should serve as a valuable guide while you set these goals.

3. Is there a clear implementation plan and timeline from the outset?

One in three project schedules don’t have a baseline plan, according to Wellingtone’s State of Project Management survey.

That’s a bit like driving to an unfamiliar place without a GPS. It’s impossible to know how far you are from your destination, or if you’re even headed in the right direction.

Think of the implementation plan as the roadmap for your software journey. It should lay out all the tasks, action items, and milestones that need to be completed, along with their associated deadlines. For example, the plan should include near- and far-off items such as holding a project kickoff call, providing data collection sheets, delivery of the site, sign-off on acceptance criteria, and holding end-user training. In short, nothing should be left to chance, and nothing critical should be left undefined.

4. Do you have enough internal resources lined up to do the necessary work?

While a good project manager and implementation team are key to a successful implementation, even the best ones cannot handle everything alone.

Large-scale implementations take effort from both sides, and many organizations underestimate the amount of internal resources needed to complete a software implementation. As a result, 78% of IT and business leaders feel the business is usually or always out of sync with project requirements and business stakeholders need to be more involved and engaged in the requirements process. (Source: Geneca)

Before starting any implementation, your implementation team should assess your internal resources and ensure you’ve allocated adequate time and personnel. Throughout the project, they should help coordinate, distribute, and share the workload so no one feels like they’re drowning in work.

5. Are there clear channels for communication?

Keeping your project on track requires constant communication between your team and your vendor’s team. The best project managers know this, and make sure to prioritize their customers’ requests, concerns, and questions.

How your project manager handles your first few interactions will give you a good idea of how responsive they’ll be throughout your project. Is the person dependable, on-time, and prepared for meetings? Do they respond quickly to emails without your needing to follow up? Perhaps most importantly, do they make you feel comfortable reaching out if you have a question?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, it’s a clear sign that you, your implementation, and your time aren’t a priority.

6. Is there a plan to ensure adoption and rollout are successful?

A software implementation counts as a success only when the software is used widely, consistently, and effectively. To that end, there should be a clear plan in place to ensure adoption and rollout are successful.

You wouldn’t hand your teenager the keys to a new car and expect them to know how to drive. Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to expect your employees to start using a new software just because they just got their login information.

Each type of user — scientists, team leads, safety specialists, upper management, etc. — should know how the software fits into their daily workflow, so stay focused on transparency and open communication around expectations (What’s coming when? How will learning be managed? Are all IT requirements understood and accounted for?)

Additionally, using an Early Adopter Model will give you a chance to foster a skilled, enthusiastic group of users before bringing the rest of your organization into the fold. Remember — the most important thing here is long term success.

We’ve found that internal emails are a great way to introduce the system both to early adopters as well as the larger research community upon rollout of the system.

Some sample topics to consider:

• A brief overview of the system
• Expected features and functionality
• The benefits users will experience
• How to get started with the system
• The importance of the system to support your organization’s specific mission

Your implementation team should be able to listen to early adopter feedback and adapt their approach as necessary. Often times, the rollout phase gets overlooked, so try to work through the process in your head and you’ll be able to tell whether your vendor is prepared or just winging it.

Last, but certainly not least:

7. Does the implementation team make this feel exciting, or are you dreading implementation?

The first time you use your new software, you’ll feel a rush of excitement when you see all your hard work start to pay off. But that excitement can quickly change to frustration and disappointment when you run into an unexpected delay or setback. That could be anything from the loss of a key team member to a lag in providing data to upload to the system. In any case, these problems can disrupt the momentum your team has built.

Throughout the implementation, the implementation team and project manager should drive the implementation forward while anticipating potential issues. Sometimes, delays are totally avoidable or easily manageable. Other times, delays are inevitable — but a skilled implementation team will help you navigate them and minimize the impact to your project.

One frequently overlooked part of success in keeping a project going forward is simply maintaining that feeling of excitement for all parties involved. When a roadblock happens for a project you love, you’re that much more motivated to get through it quickly, or have more resilience in waiting it out. Alternatively, if you view the project as a waste of time and effort, roadblocks tend to have a way of dragging out even longer than they need to.

While these kinds of large software implementations can feel overwhelming, just remember that your implementation team should always be there to make it feel like a more approachable and winnable project.

Key Takeaways

• A successful software implementation comes down to the people on your and your vendor’s teams, as well as the process put in place.
• By having a clear direction and understanding of the steps and resources needed to get there, you can avoid many of the setbacks that plague software implementations.
• Having the implementation conversation with your vendor early on will give you the best chance of success.

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Entering data, correcting errors, and creating reports can be an administrative nightmare. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Good software simplifies many of the manual, time-consuming tasks you perform on a day-to-day basis — freeing you up to focus on more valuable activities. For example, SciShield has been shown to save organizations over 1,200 hours on inspections alone.

4 ways that good software adds hours to your day

1. Data entry

Safety professionals and leaders spend far too much time on manual data entry. Every minute wasted rekeying data into the computer is time that could have been spent on higher-impact safety tasks. Not to mention, manually transcribing information opens you up to errors and omissions that could cause even more resources to be wasted down the road.

Let’s say you’re one of the lucky few that only spends 15 minutes a day gathering data and re-entering it across different workbooks or systems. That might not seem like much, but it adds up to 65 hours a year — or 8 workdays! Multiply that by the number of people on your team, and the time wasted is staggering.

Simply typing faster or hiring more consultants isn’t the solution — good software is. The right software lets you enter data once, then use it across all your reports and data views. For example, once training records are entered into the system, they can be viewed across all your reports to track training compliance for individual laboratories, departments, or your entire organization. By eliminating the need to transfer data from one location to another, good software avoids spending the extra time on pointless copying and pasting.

2. Quality control

Another problem with manual data entry is that mistakes are often unavoidable. In fact, research suggests that 88% of spreadsheets contain “significant” errors.

Once they’re entered, these errors are difficult to find and correct — and they can be costly. Adding a zero when rekeying chemical quantities, for example, can mean the difference between being within or in excess of allowable limits. And that means hours and hours of valuable time wasted trying to hunt down and correct the source of the error.

With good software, searching for errors in spreadsheets no longer needs to be part of your workday. Built-in data validation helps prevents bad data from being entered into the system in the first place, and makes it easy to locate and address errors if they occur.

That means your team can spend more time planning chemical hazard training or improve relationships with researchers, for example, instead of combing through chemical inventory data for mistakes.

3. Data manipulation & analysis

If you’re using separate systems to manage your data, answering questions and generating reports is a chore. The typical process of sifting through binders, pulling data from spreadsheets, and performing calculations pulls you away from other tasks that need your attention. Not to mention how much time it takes to bring data from paper to digital, and vice versa.

With an integrated system, all your data is stored in one place so it’s available for analysis. You can view your data in real-time on dashboards to get a clear snapshot of training, inspections, and equipment status. Or, you can compile information from various sources for reporting with just a few clicks. Not only is it a more efficient process, it’s also more accurate. This is particularly true and necessary when considering a system for your chemical inventory needs.

4. Data access & sharing

Over the next week, take note of how much time you spend sitting in status meetings or running queries requested by your labs, other members of your team, and senior management.

Good software solves this problem by making information available to all appropriate parties — when and where they need it. Managers don’t have to call and interrupt you for updates, and you don’t have to call and interrupt researchers. Everyone has access to the answers they need in order to do their job well (and, critically, no access to information that shouldn’t be accessible).

Another advantage of good software: It provides organizations with a single platform for communication and information-sharing. During an inspection, for example, findings are entered into the system and are accessible to both EHS and researchers in one centralized location. With this ‘single source of truth’ to improve communication, teams can spend less time trying to figure out if they're looking at the same version of a spreadsheet and ultimately collaborate more efficiently.

Your takeaway

By implementing good software, you spend less time on administrative tasks and have more time to focus on improving safety culture. A few final thoughts:

• Just because you have a software system in place doesn't mean it's the best solution for you.
• Like eating soup with a fork, even good software will yield disappointing results if it's the wrong tool for the job. That’s why it’s so important to choose software that is designed for your specific needs.
• Don’t settle. Good software should feel like a relief to use compared to your previous system.

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