You have finally had it with your master Excel document and you’re ready to make the move to safety management software. As a safety pro, you already know you’re going to save up to 10 hours a week just by eliminating data entry and manual reporting. But how do you make sure your team has the same positive experience?
Rolling out your safety software isn’t all that different from another process change. It’s all about buy-in and feedback.
Here’s how you can break down safety software implementation in five steps (and very little headache).
1. Get Familiar with the Software
Before you can champion the app, you need to go deeper yourself. You can’t roll out software that you don’t love, and you won’t know if you love it until you try it.
Here are some of the Safesite team’s and customer’s best tips for orienting yourself:
- Schedule a demo for the software.
- Get inducted with Safesite’s weekly webinar.
- Create a test project and run it to get familiar with the app.
- Write down your experiences with the app — positive and negative. (Better yet, add them as an Observation in your test project!)
- Identify the core ways the app will make your team’s work easier and save lives.
Tip: Still have questions? Get in touch for a personalized answer from Safesite’s Safety Success Team.
2. Identify a Champion at Every Level of User
There are many moving parts in implementing any type of safety software process change: your goal is to make it simple enough to stop people from fearing it. To get to that point, you need buy-in.
Achieving buy-in differs for every team. But generally speaking, you will fare better by asking a handful of users to act as ‘guinea pigs’ than by informing the whole team that “everyone uses this software now, no matter what.”
One of the best ways to find guinea pigs is to identify an app champion at every level of user, including and especially leadership on the ground.
How to Pick Your Safety Software Champion
Who should your champion be? There are two champion archetypes who will add value to the process.
- Find someone who embraces change and technology. They are maybe new to the team and not dedicated to “the way we’ve always done things” or have used a similar solution in the past.
- Make your second champion the person who would otherwise be your biggest hold-out. Maybe that’s someone who is resistant to change or who proudly declares themselves to not be tech-savvy.
When you choose these two types, you’re also capturing the skeptics among your group when you roll the project out. Because if you already have your potential biggest hold-out on board, then you have a kind of social proof that you can’t buy.
3. Establish a Feedback Loop
Feedback is a critical part of any software rollout. You need to build it into the rollout from the start to make the most of it.
Don’t be afraid to get feedback as often as you need. You can even build it in every other day if you’re unsure.
A few suggestions for getting a feedback loop:
- Use email to ask for and share feedback
- Include suggestions for improving use or experience based on feedback
- Assign feedback by requiring your testers to complete observations within the software
- Involve the safety software provider in the feedback loop to give them the chance to tailor the experience to your needs.
4. Rollout the App to Your Champions
You’ve got your champions and your feedback system set up! It’s time to roll it out to your initial users.
So how do you do it? It happens in a few steps.
- Get them trained on the features. They’ll have a basic understanding of what the software does.
- Let them play with the app.
- Use your feedback loop to make changes. Remember to focus those changes as much on what works as what doesn’t.
When you take this route, they will already know what they’re doing when it’s time to go live, which will reduce the pressure they’d otherwise feel with a process change.
5. Push the Rollout Live
Now that your safety champions have helped you improve the experience, it’s time to think about rolling it out to your other core users.
Start by walking the team through the download process and teaching them the basics, like how to use hazard identification. However, there’s no need to hand-hold. Give them the opportunity to go out and find solutions.
You might direct them to the help library, onboarding tutorial, or ask their peers in the field.
It’s incredibly important to continue your feedback loop after you go live. Keep working with your users, your provider, and your leadership to get the most you can out of your safety management software.
Can Safety Software Rollout Be Painless? Yes!
A safety software rollout is a change to generate enthusiasm for your new processes. Why? Because a roll-out isn’t a one-and-done event; it’s a change that allows you to generate useful feedback and create organic buy-in for your safety program.
By using Safesite’s (or your chosen software) resources and using champions to drum up buy-in, you can make your software roll-out absolutely painless.
Are you ready to get started? Download the forever-free Safesite app from the Google Play or Apple App Store.
