Utilising Microsoft to Digitise and Automate your Health and Safety Management System

Safety 7 Webinar - November 2023

Earlier last month, Peter Jenkins (Lead Facilitator at Simple Foundry) was invite to speak at a Safety 7 webinar.

With a mix of attendees across the UK and beyond, Peter spent an hour talking through the benefits of digitalising and automating Health and Safety Management systems through Microsoft.

Applying the learnings to:

• Health and Safety professionals
• Functional Directors & Business Owners
• (Health and Safety) Consultants

Peter took the 30 odd attendees through a worked example of a Health and Safety Event (hazard/near miss/incident), and how it can be streamlined across any organisation.

For the session, Peter focused on 6 areas:

• Microsoft Forms
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Power Automate
• Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft To Do
• Microsoft Lists

What were the key takeaways?

The hour went by incredibly quickly, but here are the key points about each of the sections covered:

Microsoft Forms

For forms, checklists, quizzes, audits, and more. Microsoft Forms is the basis of many Health and Safety digital processes:

• Set your permissions - Create dedicated forms for people in your business to access, or open up a form to the world
• Adapt your questions with attachments - You can use sections and questions to break up unwieldy processes. Add a video or picture to a form and bring it to life!
• Use Form outputs live in events or meetings - With present mode, you can show live responses to questions as they're coming in. This can really increase engagement and the 'fun factor' of outputs.

Microsoft Teams

Teams can be considered a frontend for SharePoint. It can be a bit more user friendly and comes with a tonne of integration opportunities:

• Access it from any device - If you can integrate your processes with Teams, you can use any internet enabled device with a browser to access it, dramatically increasing usability without having to buy dedicated hardware
• Set your permissions carefully - In the same way you manage your SharePoint, be mindful of who you give access to on Teams. Unless you've set your document permissions up properly, someone may access personally identifiable information, and you have a prospective data breach on your hands
• Think of it as a 'hub' for your information - Using Power Automate, you can automatically store a lot of process outputs in Microsoft Teams, across different 'teams' and 'channels'. Using the Tab functions, you can easily direct people to embedded Forms, documents, or worksheets, without them having to struggle working through folders to find information or processes quickly.

Microsoft Power Automate

Your best friend in reducing admin burdens. This is how you will save key time and money.

• Build your flows to work for you, not around you - Power Automate is critical in getting your digitisation and automation journey off to a strong start. Each 'flow' in Power Automate has the potential to save you hours of work a week. It thrives in working as part of a 'joined up' system, so don't create flows for the sake of it. Manage your whole process and see where flow can speed it up.
• Test your imagination! - I love Power Automate! I've been using it for years, but I didn't know what I didn't know, and until I started using it, I wasn't even sure what could be done. Compared to most of the standard Health and Safety Software packages, it will get you approximately 90% of the way there against what they do.
• Don't forget to test it - Power Automate works very well, but we're all human and we can make mistakes. Don't forget to regularly test your process when you're working on it, and remember that Google is your friend when trying to troubleshoot!

Microsoft Planner

Your aggregated action tracker, perfect for tracking multiple actions in buckets across different planners.

• Set up your buckets and your planners- You don't have to have a 'catch-all' planner that tries to get everything from H&S in the same place. Through setting up planners and buckets in a way that works for you, you can segment actions without them becoming overwhelming. Using the built-in dashboards for your pinned planners, you can see (at a glance) what is outstanding and what's already been completed.
• Integrate actions, automatically - The beauty of a holistic Microsoft Health and Safety Management System is that you can integrate all of your actions from forms or processes into a planner straight away! No admin needed once you've set up your processes through Power Automate.
• Save time with charts - All planners come with built-in charts to help managers track who has done what from each bucket or planner. These can be 'snip tooled' for quick and efficient escalation of action completion, proving you're 'doing what you say you're going to do' whatever level of the business you're working in

Microsoft To Do

Your personal action tracker, where you assign actions to someone through Planner, they will show up in their To Do list.

• Get people engaged - Microsoft To Do is a terrific way of keeping track of actions that are due from aggregated plans. It's just a shame more people don't know about it! Show people how easy it is to download the app to their desktop, and pin it to the taskbar so it will show how many actions are due at one time.
• Set up your 'body' properly - There's two things that make up a task. The title, and the body. If your title has all the information you need in, then great! But you can help structure your action body's by making templates. So it might be that for every action you have a body that includes: a description, urgency rating, escalation contact, geographical area, or other information. This context can be critical to get right, as it ensures your actions will be completed the way you expect them to be.
• Consider how you validate actions - To Do can be a very simplistic tool; you can assign and action and someone can click 'complete' when it's done using the To Do app, but you might find that you want some extra commentary when people complete their actions. For this they'd need to go onto https://tasks.office.com and look at the actions assign to them there. That way they can add extra comments underneath.

Microsoft Lists

Your interactive online lists, a bit like an Excel table, but with different functionality.

• Use lists for actions where you need more information and filters - This can be fairly easy to set up. Don't see your 'list' as being a single column list, but instead treat it like a multicolumn table. This way you can add a lot more relevant information in to help users understand what's expected of them
• Don't forget about the comments! - Similar to 'To Do', you can add comments to individual list items. This can be incredibly useful to keep track of changes or understand what stage of completion a list item is at.
• Use the column settings - Columns can be set up as multiple different 'types' from 'Yes/No' to numbers (with range limits), to text or even rich text. This can make adding pertinent information so much easier. Remember though, some automations don't integrate well with certain column types, so don't forget to test your automated processes as you go along!

How can Simple Foundry help?

Reach out to us through our contact form for further information, or drop us an email at peter@simplefoundry.co.uk and we'd be more than happy to help where we can!

In the meantime, check out the video by clicking on the thumbnail below: