Future of work: A transformative era for EHS

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May 4, 2023 - Our Future of work series explores the evolution of compliance as it intersects environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives with environmental, health, and safety (EHS) and converges with technological innovations that are radically transforming our workplace.

Future of work: Emerging global trends in EHS (part one of this series) identifies ways that organizations are adapting to new post-pandemic workplace challenges. Now, we explore how EHS professionals are leveraging technology to improve worker safety, well-being, productivity, and engagement.

How EHS will evolve in a deeply digital age

The emergence of new technologies has transformed the way businesses operate and manage risk. In today’s digital age, advanced tools and technologies are used to better understand, assess, and manage risks within an organization and across its supply chain, including:

Artificial intelligence (AI) will drastically improve many existing technologies and create new ones. The impact of AI is already prevalent in our everyday lives as it powers many of our most-used software systems and mobile applications. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing have opened the public’s eyes to the capabilities and even current limitations of AI. In EHS, AI is making risk management software tools more powerful by improving and expanding data-collection capabilities and enabling real-time analytics, enhancing the ability to detect patterns and identify key indicators to prevent safety hazards and incidents before they occur. Ultimately, the workplace becomes safer and more productive, making predictive EHS a game changer.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are fast becoming effective tools for workplace safety training as they allow the employee to safely immerse themselves into an interactive and true-to-life environment to exercise the skills needed to perform hazardous work activities. The technology is decreasing in cost and thus increasingly accessible for organizations to adopt as a proven training tool for worker health and safety.
Computer vision (CV) marries AI, machine learning, and video-recording technologies to quickly process and analyze streaming video. Applications for this tech include workplace hazard identification such as blocked exit doors and chemical spills, improper use of personal protective equipment (PPE), and poor lifting techniques. The software for this technology can trigger safety personnel to intervene and take corrective steps when necessary as well as use video recordings as a worker training tool.
Industrial wearables: sensor technology, along with the Internet of Things (IOT), is serving as the foundation for the industrial wearables that are actively being developed, tested, and even deployed for various safety and non-safety applications. In the safety arena, PPE is a prime benefactor that is becoming smarter. Examples include shoes with insoles that will detect fatigue and possible ergonomic injuries, hardhats with sensors that monitor for heat stress, and smart vests that communicate with forklifts and robots to avoid collisions. This technology will support greater risk-reduction and mitigation efforts and allow risk monitoring to become more widespread and continuous.

The adoption of new and unfamiliar technologies brings higher potential for questions and loss of trust from the workforce. When adopting these technologies, it is critical to create a plan, engage all affected stakeholders, and be transparent with the purpose and goals for adopting the new tech. Also, consider the proper management of protected data and the cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities that accompany new tech as well as prudent control measures needed to protect against threats.

Workplace organizational design

The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) describes organizational design as the “physical and functional infrastructures influencing where, when, and how work is conducted.” Organizational design considers many psychosocial and physical aspects of the workplace that can greatly impact worker health, safety, and well-being, such as job flexibility and autonomy, burnout and stress prevention, healthy leadership, social and corporate responsibility, the built environment, and work-life balance.

The cutting-edge technologies described above and many others like them, along with global events such as the pandemic and climate change, are shaping what the future of work will look like.

For many organizations, the long-term vision of the workplace is one that is highly digital, highly connected, and highly advanced. Dubbed “Industry 4.0,” the concept is to adopt these cutting-edge technologies to make their manufacturing processes and the workplace more connected, efficient, nimble, automated, and autonomous.

Already, businesses are adopting many advances such as autonomous robots, sensor-based process controls, and flexible production lines that will drive the Industry 4.0 transformation. While these Industry 4.0 technologies have the potential to radically transform the manufacturing process, their emphasis is often on increasing productivity, efficiencies, and revenue without fully assessing the potential new, unforeseen risks and hazards that can be created for workers and the environment.

Enter “Industry 5.0,” the concept of designing a human-centric Industry 4.0 workplace that is safe, environmentally sustainable, and resilient. The Industry 5.0 concept focuses on designing a safe workplace and retraining and reskilling workers to stay safe in advanced work environments, exploring how these technologies can also be used to better manage environmental risks.

As technology advances, Industry 4.0 and 5.0 strands need to run in tandem. Future workplaces will continue to be designed with more advanced AI systems and machine learning, which will make equipment and process decisions part of a feedback loop. However, if safety and environmental risks and controls are not accounted for in the conceptual and planning stages, they could create unintended and unanticipated risks for workers and the environment alike.

Read part one of our series Future of work: Emerging global trends in EHS and keep an eye out for our upcoming Future of work insights papers. Follow along with these and other EHS topics that should be at the top of your list at BSI’s Experts Corner.

For more insight into the residual challenges created by the pandemic that companies are facing, take a look at BSI's Prioritizing people initiative.