Identifying hazards that can injure your workers or make them ill is your duty under the law. It also should be a driving force behind your safety and health process.
One definition of a hazard is any unsafe workplace condition or practice that could cause injuries or illness to employees. Another is any danger that threatens harm to employees. However you define it, a hazard must first be identified before it can be analyzed and solutions can be developed, implemented, and evaluated.
What systems are in place at your facility for identifying risks? Are employees actively involved? Is the process wide-ranging with components that assess equipment and processes from multiple perspectives? Most important, does it succeed in revealing potentially harmful conditions?
Hazard Often Overlooked
As a global provider of safety and health services, Bureau Veritas helps diverse clients understand and address risk. With 40,000 employees in 900 worldwide locations, Bureau Veritas offerings include safety-related inspecting, testing, auditing, certifying, and training. Robert Murphy is vice president of technical services for the Paris-based company.
“Hazards may have existed for a long time, but people have been walking or working around them for so long that they don’t recognize them,” says Murphy. That’s why there’s so much potential value in engaging another set of eyes. “Sometimes an outside party looking at a process will get the feeling that something just doesn’t look right, or will ask what may seem like a silly question,” he adds.
That “silly” question can reveal a lurking hazard that was only prevented from becoming an accident by sheer luck. When asked why a risky practice persists, a frequent answer is “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”
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Hazard Reviews
As part of its offerings, Bureau Veritas experts conduct facility hazard reviews. “We might spend a day conducting a walkthrough and taking pictures, then use what we find to conduct a class for supervisors and managers,” says Murphy.
“I think one of the things safety people need to take into account is what’s happening when they’re not around, like during maintenance, on the third shift, or during a particularly busy period when big orders are coming in and out.”
Murphy says it’s wise to ask what hazards may not be visible today, but may emerge tomorrow “when all heck breaks loose.” The walk-through findings should be matched to safety programs and controls to ensure that each hazard is being addressed.
Employee Input Critical
Murphy believes supervisory personnel are essential to this process. “What becomes important to the supervisor becomes important to the employees. If they drive hazard identification and correction, employees will drive it, too. The key is participation.”
One of the most consistent failures Murphy observes is a lack of follow-through. Employees are encouraged to report risks through a suggestion box or other methods. But too often the cycle ends there, with management failing to take corrective action or even respond.
Not every employee suggestion warrants a fix, according to Murphy. Some are simply not valid; in other cases, the problem may be logistical or budgetary. But a response of some kind is essential. Among other things, it demonstrates that leaders are listening to employees and trying their best to respond to their concerns.
“If I make a recommendation and I don’t hear back from someone, I may try one more time, but why bother after that? Getting feedback is one of the most critical part of the process.”
Relying on the safety department or other levels of management to find hazards is not enough, Murphy insists. Employee input is essential.
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The Art of the Audit
Bureau Veritas also helps clients assess risk by conducting various types of audits. Perhaps the most basic is the housekeeping audit. Murphy suggests developing and constantly updating a customized checklist for each work area or department. This includes any and all hazards ever observed there.
Although the frequency of audits is dependent on resources and plant size, Murphy suggests a formal housekeeping audit each month, plus an informal, employee-led weekly walkthrough.
Murphy also recommends a regular process or engineering audit, which assesses safety and health systems and, as such, requires a different level of analysis.
This type of review starts with questions like, “What are the worst-case scenarios within a particular process?” or “If something goes wrong, where will people be?” Based on the answers, find ways to make the process less hazardous and to position people out of harm’s way.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the hazard identification practices of another employer that uses a multi-tiered auditing system to drive its hazard ID process.