NorLand's Brooks Patterson on the company's award-winning online safety portal
As a company with extensive operations in infrastructure, industry, and resources, NorLand Limited cares about the safety of its employees and communities, and focuses its efforts on minimizing risk in its worksites.
Ensuring that “everyone goes home safe” is a guiding principle embodied in NorLand’s online training portal launched in 2018. This technology enables all employees to access health and safety training courses while allowing the company to monitor training metrics.
Due to the effectiveness of this online portal for safety training and reporting, NorLand received an Excellence Award for the Most Innovative Use of Safety Technology, an accolade presented by Canada’s Safest Employers in 2022.
The online safety portal “allows visual-based learning and [provides] information to large groups of people in remote areas,” said Brooks Patterson, NorLand’s vice president for health, safety, environment and loss control, in an interview with COS.
He explained that the online training system was essential for communication, especially during the pandemic. The system improved employees’ safety by filling gaps in their decision-making while motivating them to do self-directed training.
“We started out as being a regulatory kind of solution because we believe that safety is not really about the absence of accidents. It’s about the presence of capacity and the presence of defences,” Patterson said. “And people are not the problem to be managed. They are actually the problem solvers. How do people solve problems? They solve problems by having the right information and the tools necessary to make good decisions in the field.”
Other companies can set up a similar portal by first assessing their own needs and identifying problems, Patterson said. In NorLand’s case, the online system addressed concerns related to employee onboarding and organizing useful information for staff in many different places.
“I think for any company that’s contemplating this type of thing, there might be off-the-shelf products like [those] for WHMIS and TDG that already exist in the marketplace. And there are folks out there that do the work. But if your need is to develop things that are customized to a specific work environment, which we found that we needed, then a company like [Absolute Training Systems can help],” he said.
Patterson added that apart from being accessible, NorLand’s customized online training system has a reasonable per-user cost, which made it an easy decision for the company to make.
