To Make This Happen You Will Need To...

Starting 9 weeks ago, I began a series of Safety E-QuickTips where we discussed the value of developing, implementing and managing a company safety and health program.

We discussed how a company can save from $3-$6 for every dollar spent on company safety programs and that for every dollar cost of an accident, approximately $3-$5 additional dollars are spent as indirect costs.

We went on to discuss some specific direct and indirect costs associated with accidents in the workplace, and based on all of the information we discussed, there is absolutely no doubt that successfully implemented safety and health programs can improve a company's bottom line.

Then we continued the series with the 4 steps that you can take to protect your employees from accidents in the workplace. They are as follows:

1. Establish Policies and Procedures that Meet OSHA Requirements
2. Effectively Communicate Your Safety Program and Procedures to Your Employees
3. Perform Regular and Frequent Worksite Inspections
4. Enforce and/or Reinforce Your Safety Policies and Procedures

For the next couple of weeks, I’d like to talk about how you can take everything we have been discussing and pull it all together to successfully develop, implement and manage your company safety and health program so everyone comes out a winner - from your employees to the company itself.

To make this happen you will need to implement a Safety Management System (SMS). To help you better understand just what a SMS is, I thought I would use one of the descriptions found in Wikipedia that I believe really makes it clear, so here goes.

“A SMS provides a systematic way to identify hazards and control risks while maintaining assurance that these risk controls are effective. [1] SMS can be defined as:

...a businesslike approach to safety. It is a systematic, explicit and comprehensive process for managing safety risks. As with all management systems, a safety management system provides for goal setting, planning, and measuring performance. A safety management system is woven into the fabric of an organization. It becomes part of the culture, the way people do their jobs. [2]

For the purposes of defining safety management, safety can be defined as:

... the reduction of risk to a level that is as low as is reasonably practicable.

There are three imperatives for adopting a safety management system for a business – these are ethical, legal and financial.

There is an implied moral obligation placed on an employer to ensure that work activities and the place of work to be safe, there are legislative requirements defined in just about every jurisdiction on how this is to be achieved and there is a substantial body of research which shows that effective safety management (which is the reduction of risk in the workplace) can reduce the financial exposure of an organization by reducing direct and indirect costs associated with accident and incidents.

To address these three important elements, an effective SMS should:

• Define how the organization is set up to manage risk.
• Identify workplace risk and implement suitable controls.
• Implement effective communications across all levels of the organization.
• Implement a process to identify and correct non-conformities.
• Implement a continual improvement process.

A safety management system can be created to fit any business type and/or industry sector.”

I believe that is a very straight forward description of an SMS and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

By the way, if you clicked on [1] or [2] in the description you may have noticed that the links do not currently go anywhere but that is also the case when you go directly to Wikipedia and view this description .

Now that you know what a Safety Management System is, next week we’ll discuss how you can use one to develop, implement and manage your safety and health program.