Workplace Health and Safety Procedures

Almost all of us realize by now that whatever you do in business, it affects all workers, customers, friends and family. A safety program is an effective way of reducing the risks to our workers. Safety program assigns responsibilities to everyone in the company. The owner has responsibilities, supervisors have responsibilities, workers have responsibilities, and subcontractors have responsibilities and yes even visitor’s have responsibilities.

It is easier for all the risks to be managed by distributing the responsibilities among employees than one person trying to do everything. To make a simple comparison, it is easier to lift a great weight when you have 10 friends helping you than if you were to try to do it alone.

It is the responsibility of everyone to ensure workplace health and safety. It’s the company’s responsibility to make sure that all the safety procedures are in place and the safety guidelines are being followed by everyone.

In many cases you can not work for the big companies without having a cor safety program from one of the certifying partners. In order to be a prime contractor for a government job you must have a recognized health and safety program.

So why is it that this safety program is such a big deal? Well it has everything to do with statistics. Workers Compensation Board (WCB) agencies have always kept stats on each and every industry as far as accidents and injuries and man days lost to injuries and you name it they keep statistics on it. They started keeping stats within industries for companies that have a cor safety program and companies that don’t have a cor-program.

Well the results are astounding and almost unbelievable at first glance. They saw a trend immediately and started tracking the trend. It seems that companies that have a cor program represented about 63% or the industry yet when it came to serious accidents and lost time accidents they represented only 32% of the accidents.

You ask? Why is that I wonder. Simply put the companies that have cor programs investigate all accidents, and close calls and put corrective actions in place so it can’t or won’t happen again. You can learn a lot from a close call or near miss. If you put a system in place so the close call won’t happen again it will prevent a future accident from happening. A close call is a warning if you will and if you listen to that warning and put systems in place to prevent them in the future then you have prevented accidents. With the companies that don’t have a cor program in place, they don’t investigate these and eventually they turn into an accident of a serious nature.

Quite often safety procedures are developed from a close call or near miss or even a minor accident. Then we develop a system to prevent it from happening again. It is all part of the safety management system known as a cor safety program.

How to prepare for a Safety Program Audit?

Alberta Safety and Auditing Service provides you with the key to prepare for an audit on your safety program. The first thing you should do is, find a copy of the audit that will be used to evaluate your safety program. Go through the audit line by line and place a check mark in pencil or an 'x' if you currently do not do what is asked. Go through the audit and make check marks or 'x’ by each question.

If you do not understand what does a question mean or you do not know what exactly need to be done about a particular audit line then, place a question mark '?' besides it instead of a check mark or an 'x'.

Once you have gone through the complete document you now know what you need to do and where to start from. Proceed with the 'x' first of all. If you are in trouble because you are not doing something that is mentioned in your safety programs it is better you find the error yourself than someone else points you for that. It will be better if you discover that your workers need specialized training for an activity and start training the workers right away, than waiting for the audit and then working upon it.

When you address errors or omissions in your safety program, always document the new procedures in your corrective action log. In many cases when auditors see that you have identified an item and it is listed in corrective action log with a competent worker assigned to do the corrections, they will not identify it as an error. In fact in some cases they actually give you points for identifying the error and doing a corrective action for it. I know it sounds unbelievable that you could have an error and get more marks for it than if you had it right in the first place. The audit system is also a measure of how you correct things in your program as you go along.

Once you have completed all the corrections of the omissions and errors in your cor safety program, you move towards the check marks. You carefully gather documentation for each question and put it in a temp folder and make file for each question. This way you know that you have the proper documentation for each question in the audit. You will of course have all the new documentation from the 'x' questions you answered earlier. One of those blue box temp file folder boxes usually works great for this practice.

I don’t want an auditor snooping through my files per say so that is why I create the temp folders. I might add that you don’t have to do it this way but if you don’t make sure someone from your company is on standby so they can retrieve the files and folders that the auditor will ask.

Now you have answered all the questions you know, now start with the ones that you have a question mark beside. You can search the terms over the Internet and find out more about what they mean. Don’t get mistaken by the facts about things your company do not do. That means it’s not applicable and it does not mean that the question will be marked wrong. Many times you can actually call the auditor himself or herself and ask them the question. This way you will be sure to have the proper documentation that they will be expecting. Audits are not like big tests. They will usually share what their expectations are.

If you find that you just don’t understand any of the stuff on the audit sheet or don’t have any of the stuff they seem to need, you can hire a safety service company like myself to come in for about a week and help you prepare for your audit. In some cases where the audit is being done by one of your big clients it is not a bad idea to seek professional help in preparation. You don’t want to look bad and may be loosing a major client over an audit.

New Policies For Workplace Health & Safety

Alberta Safety and Auditing Service is providing safety services with the latest techniques which meet the Small Employer Certificate of Recognition(SECOR) Standards. One of the new policies that the certifying partners are asking for is, a safety meeting policy. They want you to commit as management, to having a safety meeting at least once a month. I’m not talking about a tool box meeting or a pre-job meeting as these are held usually daily or at least weekly on the construction sites. I am talking of formal safety meeting where everyone’s required to attend and it would take approximately one to two hours to complete.

The minimal requirements for the minutes of a safety meeting would be; name of the chairperson, policy time and location of the safety meeting, name of the person taking the minutes. You must discuss all the previous incidents, accidents, and close calls that happened between the last meeting and this meeting. Now you open the floor to all the workers and invite their participation in the safety meeting by asking them if they have anything to add. It helps if you go around before the safety meeting and encourage people to talk about things that are happening in their work areas. Usually, when one person talks about something the ice is broken and everyone will chip in with their opinions on the subject. It is very important not to let this get off-topic so basically channel the non-safety related questions until coffee break or other such time.

You would also list any actions to be taken as a result of incident or accident investigations, these corrective actions would be assigned to a specific individual with a target date set. Sometimes you may even set up a committee to investigate or to research how it is done in other places and get better ideas on how you can complete the task in your company. These are all mentioned in the minutes as well. Finally everyone must sign the sheet to prove attendance. Those who are not in attendance will be given a copy of these minutes so that they will know what was discussed at the meeting. Only those who are excused from the safety meeting for prior work-related commitments or other things such as, vacation that was previously scheduled will be allowed to miss the meeting. Other people who miss the safety meeting without permission will find themselves with disciplinary action.

Safety meeting should be put on the health and safety board until the time of the next meeting and then it should be filed in the folder of safety meetings. Workplace wealth & safety must be the priority for all organizations in todays date.

Safety Program Evaluations

At Alberta Safety and Auditing Service, the job we perform is to evaluate existing health and safety programs. When we evaluate a safety program, we literally take it apart and look at all the intricate parts and working of the program.We make sure there are correct amount of policies, a mission statement, assignments and responsibilities for workers, managers, supervisors, and senior managers. We also make sure that, if they use subcontractors they are listed in the assignment of responsibilities as well. Next, we make sure they meet all the current Occupational Health & Safety guidelines and codes for the type of industry they are working in. For instance, if they deal with any chemicals or dangerous substances listed in schedule 1 of the occupational health and safety(OH & S) regulations they would need a code of practice for each of the substances they deal with.

A code of practice is specifically designed for your company, depending upon how the workers are going to deal safely with the dangerous chemicals. It even describes the acceptable Personal protective equipments (PPE) that will be worn including model numbers and unit numbers of the PPE. It will give very detailed instructions on how to deal with the dangerous chemicals including LEL’s and UEL’s (lower and upper flammability limit) and describing whether it is heavier than air or lighter than air.

After we check to see if any codes of practice are missing or needed we move on to the next section. All safety programs need a good preventative maintenance program. You need to prove that you are looking after all your equipments according to the manufacturer’s specifications. If for example, while taking care of your vehicle, you would be required to change the oil and inspect everything at least every 5000 km as per manufacturer specifications. This is also known as the owner’s manual. If you do not have an owner’s manual for a piece of equipment, you can get one from a dealer or the manufacturer. You may have to spend a little bit of money to get it but, it will tell you how and when to do regular maintenance and what to inspect while doing it. Safety program evaluations will ensure safety of your employees and thus better performance.