Enerfab employees are walking their way to better fitness. Starting Jan. 12, employees across the Enerfab family of companies - 165 of them - strapped on a Fitbit and started walking. In total, they've logged more than 20.8 million steps. That's 9,666 miles and more than 58,000 very active minutes.

The company has been rewarding employees in the Top 10 with gifts, and in the last month, they're bumping up the stakes and rewarding the Top 3 with bigger prizes. This month, they're planning a team-building challenge to motivate the team to keep moving.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends that people should walk 7,000 to 8,000 steps per day or 150 minutes of moderate activity, like brisk walking, per week. But ultimately, any increase in activity will lead to improved health. Health experts recommend starting with manageable goals and working up to the ideal goals, heading toward 10,000 steps per day. 

At Enerfab Power & Industrial, we've recently begun using a mobile app to make it easier for us to spot safety concerns and document safety inspections - iAuditor.

We started piloting the program six months ago with two custom Enerfab audits - one comprehensive audit for our safety managers that evaluates safety from inspection programs to JSAs to signage on the job, and a second audit for executive and management-level personnel that focuses on observations and employee feedback through personal interviews.

"The goal is to help us assess our safety culture on the job site and to identify the leading indicators that can be addressed to prevent incidents," said Jacob Snyder, Enerfab Power & Industrial director of safety and labor relations.

He explained that the app replaces a paper-driven process and improves the overall data collection for safety audits. It allows auditors to embed photos, create action items, assign action items to team members and put in dates for completing those actions, improving overall accountability.

 "The dashboards allow us to track several hundred items to see progress and trends over time and identify areas that are opportunities for more training or emphasis," Snyder said. "It's just one of the mechanisms we're using to build a safer work environment."

The iAuditor app is available on both the Android Google Play Store and the Apple AppStore. It boasts that it has helped people complete more than 25,000 safety inspections in 80 countries and is the most popular inspection checklist app. For companies who aren't interested in building their own checklists, the app has a library of 40,000 checklists submitted by other users.

If you do customize one for your company, the app lets you build custom fields, scoring and weighting to align with your priorities and needs.