How to Re-Engineer Your Business for Safety

Is your business engineered for safety?

Back in the 1990s, businesses were all about a popular concept called re-engineering. The idea was to look at core processes in terms of cost, quality, and service, pick one dimension to reinvent, and in the process gain benefits for all three.

As businesses strive to reinvent their processes in the face of coronavirus, business re-engineering is more important than ever, especially for safety. Here’s a closer look at what that might entail – and how to do it properly.

Why Re-Engineering?

Before you take a deep dive into changing the way you operate, it begs asking the question: why change the way you do things? Why do you need to reinvent things?

Under any circumstances, safety growth is critical to a truly successful program. You cannot remain static if your goal is to create a safe environment.

But these are extraordinary circumstances. Safety, as it existed in January, is no longer the same animal, not when employees cannot even come close to customers – or each other.

What’s more, the business environment is different. Businesses have to adapt to a world where customer expectations have radically shifted. Your processes have to evolve if you hope to remain competitive.

In short, this is the perfect environment to have a serious conversation about re-engineering your central approaches and make sweeping changes that will strengthen your business in the future.

Re-Engineering in a Safety Context

Re-engineering was originally designed as a core business concept, not a safety concept. Even so, the principles of re-engineering can be applied to safety, to the benefit of your EHS team.

In a safety context, the re-engineering process would look something like this:

Identify a process, product, or experience your company engages in
Consider constraints that safety imposes on it
Imagine ways to overcome those constraints, keeping your company’s purpose front and center
Reassemble your process and test it in the real world
Think about how safety innovations can drive innovation elsewhere

For example, think about customer browsing. It’s a pretty basic part of the customer experience, but it takes on a whole new cast in light of coronavirus safety concerns. One way to change the experience while still giving customers a high quality of service is to have customers make appointments to show up at a store in person, thus limiting the number of customers who occupy the store at any given time and making it easier to observe social distancing guidelines.

Redesigning Your Approach to Safety

As you can see, even small alterations to the way you conduct business can have a radical effect on safety – to the benefit of your employees, your customers, and your organization as a whole. It’s all about having a bit of imagination, and as business owners are realizing, a bit of imagination is critical to your success in the changing pandemic environment.

And if you need more tips to help navigate the evolving coronavirus pandemic, make sure to check out our blog for more great posts like this one.