Have you considered an outsourced approach to managing DSE risk?

Whereas perhaps five or six years ago your organisation might have been in the vanguard of the move towards online DSE training and self assessment, these days it is becoming standard practise.  A quick google search reveals more than ten specialist providers of these online solutions in this growing market place.

A software based solution to managing the administrative burden of a company wide DSE training and assessment programme makes a great deal of sense.  After all, the responsibility for completing the course and questionnaire is placed on the employee and the useful data generated by this process filters back automatically into a reporting tool allowing safety professionals to review, analyse and act upon the risks the software has uncovered.

Volume of Risk

This is obviously far more streamlined than a paper based system, but not without its problems.  With the advent of automated email reminders, it is now possible to implement DSE training/assessment roll outs with unprecedented levels of coverage. Take up rates of 90% plus are far from uncommon.

So far so good, but what about all the previously unidentified risk that is now coming to the surface? Does your organisation have adequate resource to cope with the sheer level of risk that is now being identified? From my own personal experience selling these systems, I can tell you of one prospective customer who had a ratio of two administrators to ten thousand intended recipients of the programme.

How effective is your Intervention?

Having a sizeable team of DSE Assessors to intervene once you have uncovered associated risks is no guarantee of successful intervention. In many cases they have received minimal training and are trying to fit in their Health & Safety tasks and responsibilities around their main job role. What sort of impact can they really make? Line managers are not always sympathetic to the pressures on their time and fail to co-operate when assessors must be released to attend to DSE related issues. When trained assessors leave an organisation, more must be trained and there is a constant ebb and flow of skilled staff.

User Action

DSE software providers such as EssentialSkillz have taken steps to ease the burden of intervention by empowering the individual to close off a degree of risk at source. However, these user actions tended to be limited to tackling only lower level risk.

Increasingly organisations are looking for assistance from their software provider with the management and follow up of these DSE risks and this is a trend that looks set to grow.

Some of our larger customers use EssentialSkillz Ergowize hosted online DSE solution to train and assess upwards of 500 people each year. There is no such thing as an average week, but the outcome of rolling out the software to different business units could generate in the region of between forty and sixty concerns from the user that require intervention from an assessor.

Outsourcing Solution

Some organisations simply don’t have the internal resources to deal with this volume of risk and have signed up to our new managed service. DSE assessors who are trained administrators of EssentialSkillz O-LAS Learning and Assessment System provide constant telephone and email support to the Health & Safety department. Sometimes their assistance may be limited to simply collating reports and statistics for Line Managers when action is required. However, they are also able to intervene more extensively and chase up and resolve issues with end users themselves. They are able to do this as the solution is hosted by EssentialSkillz, so with the client’s permission, customer support are able to access the DSE data directly.

The service is charged at daily rate, with the customer simply purchasing an initial number of days and then topping those up depending on how much input is required to support them. The service has been so successful that plans to expand and operate a full time dedicated call centre are currently being considered.

So when planning a roll out of this type of solution, think about the impact and resourcing issues of what you are about to implement and consider a software provider that you could outsource the entire risk management programme to.