Health and Safety
The goal of an excellent Health and Safety program is to create a workplace where everyone goes home every day as healthy as when they came to work.
This can be a complex and all-consuming activity, and the cause of many sleepless nights for managers. It is therefore useful to take a structured approach to health and safety management.
The diagram below shows the work of achieving a healthy and safe workforce broken down into two basic components: encouraging safe behaviour and providing safe conditions.
Encouraging Safe Behaviour: This is about every person choosing the safest option for undertaking every activity every day. While ultimately, this comes down to individual choices, there are a number of things that a company can do to encourage safe behaviour.
- The company needs to ensure people have the skills to undertake their tasks, and to train them in safe working procedures. An appropriate risk assessment process should be followed whenever changes to procedures are made.
- The company needs to ensure people have the required fitness for the task...which includes management of fatigue and having procedures for detecting and dealing with substance abuse.
- People need to be actively looking out for the risks and hazards associated with their tasks and the tasks of others. This is assisted by providing training in hazard awareness, and on-the-job risk assessment tools.
- Safe behaviours only flourish in a no-blame culture in which the open reporting and investigation of issues is promoted. Incidents and hazards must be investigated to determine and address root cause, not assign blame.
- People regularly under-rate the risk associated with their own activities, particularly when those activities are done routinely. Active caring is about everyone looking out for the safety of others, with people feeling empowered to take action to enhance another’s safety.
- The company needs to reward and recognise safe behaviour, and take disciplinary action when required to curb unsafe behaviour.
Providing Safe Conditions: The company is obliged to provide working conditions that are as safe as possible for its employees.
- Safety needs to be considered when designing or purchasing facilities and equipment. Appropriate risk and hazard assessments should be conducted whenever changes are proposed to equipment or facilities.
- Equipment and premises need to be maintained to a high standard. The workplace should be kept clean and tidy to prevent hazards and allow the early detection of issues.
- People need to be provided with the right tools for the job, and also the right personal protective equipment (hearing protection, eye protection etc).
- Human error is responsible for a large proportion of incidents. Therefore, it is important to error-proof equipment and processes wherever possible. Where severe injury could result from the error, it is important to provide multiple barriers to injury (physical barriers, signage, safe work procedures, lock-out etc).