Setting Industrial Safety Goals for 2022 and Beyond

WORKING SAFELY BY?STEVE?SAYER

(The views and opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the author.)

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Even though we are now in the month of June, now is still a good time to set more industrial safety and health goals for 2022 at your establishment(s).

A good place to start your list of goals is to review your OSHA 300-log for 2019, 2020, 2021 and thus far in 2022.

There are a number of categories within the 300-log that you can utilize in order to measure your company’s improvements and accomplishments during the course of the year:

• Total number of reportable injuries/illnesses for the year
• Total number of days away from work due to the injury/illness
• Total number of restricted days due to the injury/illness
• The area/location where the injury/illness occurred
• The body part(s) that were affected

By using the above categories, companies can put into place a variety of expandable preventive measures, whenever applicable, in order to help eschew the same or similar reoccurrence(s) from happening in the future.

In the past, I’ve suggested to companies to review their last three to five (5) years of their OSHA 300-log and categorize all of the pertinent information as suggested above. Not surprisingly, trends can be identified and focused upon with preventive measures in the guise of PPE, structural improvements, and/or new safety policies put into place.

The sheer and keen beauty of such a measuring tool is that it involves ALL your employees, including, of course, management personnel.

Communicating your company’s on-going progress/results with your employees at training sessions/meetings during the course of the year can help tremendously with truncating reportable injuries/illness of both known and newly identified hazards at the workplace.

There are other categories that can help you measure your industrial safety goals and accomplishments:

• Near misses (where an injury nearly occurred) and their corrective actions
• First-aid cases
• Employees wearing/not-wearing their assigned PPE

Safety suggestions offered by employees

Of course the only way any industrial safety program can be successful is having 110 percent support of top management that is sincerely and fully committed to providing a safe and healthy working environment for everyone at the get-go.

Successful safety and health programs require time, patience and investments that are layered with fully dedicated employees and managers alike. There are NO shortcuts to attaining a safe and healthy working environment. It takes a lot of hard work to create and sustain a genuine safety culture that continues to improve and progress while guarding against complacency.

Years ago, I was consulting for a company that after several years of hard work, perseverance and dogmatic dedication finally attained 1 full year of zero injuries and illnesses.

During the year-end meeting, an employee raised her hand and asked,?“Since we have now reached one full calendar year of no injuries of illnesses, what’s the company goal now?”?Without hesitation the plant manager took over the microphone and answered, “Two?years straight, why?!”

Industrial safety at the workplace, regardless of goals being fully or partially met, is a continuous and ever evolving process; it never ever ends.

12/25/2015 Meatingplace.com (Revised 4/17/2022)

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