Over the course of 2021 users of Notify Technology’s digital reporting platform logged 106,802 Safety, Environmental and Governance events, a new record and up 26% on 2020.
In a year that saw us winning a Tech for Good award, we ended 2021 with a total of half a million events logged via our platform. We’re proud to help our clients, which include Travis Perkins plc, London Zoo, Siemens Mobility, Birmingham City University, and the Isle of Man Government.
Notify is on a mission to make a billion workers safer around the world, and we’ve decided that tracking usage data is the best way for us to monitor progress. We estimate that over 250,000 individual workers, contractors and visitors have used Notify software to report Safety, Environmental and Governance events, and we’re working hard to get more customers signed up.
Trends beneath the headline numbers
We saw a big increase in reporting on the Notify platform in 2021. Our clients have faced many pressures related to COVID-19 but have continued to promote safety as a route to sustainable success.
There are some really interesting themes in the data, for instance:
- Over a third of the safety events reported relate to near misses, hazard spots, unsafe conditions etc. That’s well over 30,000 data points that give our clients the chance to benefit from what we term ‘free learning events’, where they get immediate feedback from front-line workers and can evaluate whether changes are needed. This data is priceless, especially to multi-site organisations that cannot hope to have eyes on every part of the business.
- There are growing numbers of clients using Notify to help track ill-health issues, particularly in relation to COVID-19, and around 4% of all events logged in 2021 were around such reports. We’re seeing the HSE step up the focus on workplace ill-health and so we anticipate this trend to continue.
- The largest category continues to be Incidents, representing over 50% of the total events reported. Recognising that every incident is likely to require some level of investigation, we estimate we’ve saved clients 10,000 working days during 2021, in relation to speeding up the process of investigating incidents and accidents, setting corrective actions and completing any related reporting.
- Reports around Environmental events and Quality & Governance are also increasing.
I am particularly pleased that 2,000+ Positive Safety Reports were logged in 2021. Whilst Near Miss Reporting is key to spotting a signal that something is wrong, positive observations and good spots are very useful in helping share best practices and reminding colleagues of the value of working safely. We’re also seeing more of our clients encouraging employees to highlight best practices whenever they see them.
A negative trend that we saw was a sharp increase in the abuse of workers by members of the public, especially in those roles that were “essential workers” during the various lockdowns. We hope that Notify software can support our clients in ensuring that their public-facing workers are looked after and protected.
In more encouraging news, the 2021 data didn’t show a big spike in incidents and accidents. We suspected that this may have happened because of the disruption to work and training that hit in 2020. We were concerned that workers might return to work having lost a degree of familiarisation with processes and machinery. However, the good news – for our clients at least – is that the percentage of safety events coming from accidents/incidents has remained consistent over the last two years.
As for 2022, the trend continues, with our team seeing a record month of reports in January, up 24% on the prior year and showing a continued focus across our clients to encourage reporting of safety, environmental and governance events so that they are catching risks early.
Duncan Davies, Notify Technology CEO
If you would like more information, a free trial, or a personal software demonstration of Notify’s software, please contact the team on 0330 390 0530.
