Category: Special Topics in Safety Management

Safety is a process, and as such, needs to be managed. This section offers resources to create a viable safety program, sell it to senior management, train supervisors and employees in using it, and then track and report your progress. Look also for ways to advance your own skills in these areas, both for your current job, and those that follow.

Free Special Report: 50 Tips for More Effective Safety Training

The ROI of Helping Workers Quit Smoking

Yesterday we looked at the costs and complexities surrounding workplace smoking, including increased healthcare costs and absenteeism, decreased productivity, the relative rights of smokers and nonsmokers, and inconsistencies in the number and length of breaks. Today we look at tips for limiting the impact of smoking on your bottom line, including the most important of […]

Managing Workplace Smoking: A Hazy Legal Tangle

Managing smoking in the workplace is an essential task for employers. But it is made challenging by the many complex issues involved, including compliance with state and local laws, the rights of employees to smoke without suffering discrimination, the rights of nonsmokers to a safe workplace, and complaints about inconsistency in breaks between smokers and […]

Vision: It Can Be Lost in the Blink of an Eye

If you are having trouble getting your workers to wear required eye protection, try opening their eyes with some of these statistics from workplaceeyesafety.org and BLR’s OSHA Required Training for Supervisors newsletter. More than 800,000 work-related eye injuries occur every year (that’s about 2,000 a day). Many of these injuries are temporarily disabling and some […]

Safety Plus: Get Your Employees Involved

Why are successful supervisors in many organizations turning over more safety responsibilities to their employees? It isn’t because they’re shirking their duty. It’s because these supervisors have learned that the more their employees participate in safety programs, the safer the workplace becomes. OSHA has long advocated employee participation as basic to workplace safety. An agency […]

When Domestic Violence Comes to Work

Chances are very good that there are people in your workplace who are being abused. The issue often manifests itself in the workplace in one form or another, and it’s a problem you simply cannot ignore. Here’s why. According to estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey, in 2001 there were almost 700,000 nonfatal violent […]

Data Security Doesn’t End at the Front Door

Yesterday we looked at the many compelling legal reasons for adopting a portable electronic devices security policy at your organization, and we listed some important points to cover. Today we look at some other elements and considerations in drafting such a policy. In addition to the points to cover outlined in yesterday’s Advisor, BLR’s Essential […]

Securing Your Organization’s Portable Electronic Devices

With increasing frequency, confidential business and personal information is stored on portable electronic devices such as laptops, personal digital assistants, removable disk drives, memory cards, and the like. Along with this trend has come a spate of highly publicized security breaches involving the loss or theft of equipment containing customer records, Social Security numbers, driver’s […]

Lockout/Tagout: Who Needs to Know What?

Yesterday we looked at the 10 steps OSHA requires authorized lockout/tagout (LOTO) employees to follow. Today we turn to the LOTO standard’s training requirements and look at a tool that takes the pain out of providing LOTO training. As we discussed yesterday, OSHA’s LOTO standard (29 CFR 1910.147) requires you to train three groups of […]

10 Steps to Ironclad Lockout/Tagout Protection

Every year workers are injured, maimed, or killed in grisly accidents because they fail to disconnect the power source of machinery they’re repairing or servicing—or because a co-worker restarts the equipment prematurely. The truly sad part is that these accidents can be prevented simply by understanding and following OSHA’s lockout/tagout (LOTO) standard. The LOTO standard […]

Breathe Easier with Proper Respirator Care

In order to control or eliminate breathing hazards, OSHA has adopted respiratory protection regulations for general industry (except agriculture), shipyards, marine terminals, longshoring, and construction workplaces and for specific air contaminants. Today we’ll focus on the requirements concerning respirator inspection, maintenance, storage, and repair. OSHA estimates that its respirator regulation could save as many as […]