Workplace safety management—and management is a key operative word in our overview—is the synthesis of three very important considerations:

Welcoming all delegates to this informative article, where you will gain valuable insights into the critical aspects of workplace safety management. This guide focuses on three essential components that are key to creating a safe and productive work environment: consistent management effort, employee involvement, and the tactical practice of safety procedures. Understanding and implementing these elements will help ensure a safer and more inclusive workplace for everyone.

Consistent management effort

Employee involvement

Programming and the practice of the tactical aspects of workplace safety management

Consistent Management Effort

Even though many employers have tried, it is rare for a workplace safety program to succeed without consistent management effort (putting a plan together), involvement (leading by example), and dedicating the proper resources (time, materials, and money) to a program. There is a wide variation in what may be required from the resource allocation per- spective among organizations. This is a function of size, the nature of the hazards employees are exposed to, regulatory requirements, and many other factors.

workplace programs: management at its best 7

Employee Involvement

As we have uncovered during the development and analysis of literally hundreds of workplace safety programs, without the proverbial employee buy-in, few programs have any chance for success. This is the case for many reasons. Key among them is that employees feel a keen desire to be part of meaningful activities, and in fact, most often they have a considerable amount to contribute to the planning process. Who, for example, knows how to conduct operations better than your experienced employees? They may very well have recommendations or enhancements to safety proce- dures that can make great differences in reducing future hazards and em- ployee exposure to injury or illness. Later chapters will cover this in more detail.

Practicing the Tactical Aspects

Workplace safety programs should be used as tools to improve operations and processes. This cannot happen if the tactical aspects of programs are not consistently utilized or practiced.

For example, organizations that enforce the tactical element of incident investigations are able to determine if an unsafe act or unsafe condition was the underlying cause of an injury or illness. With this information, employee training can be improved, or better focused, and operational improvements can be implemented.

The definition of management includes planning, leading, organizing, and controlling. There is no better way to frame the functional aspects of workplace safety management. Workplace safety management programs perform poorly when they are reactive in nature. As you will learn soon, to be reactive implies that the hazards associated with a job or tasks are allowed to exist before any preventive action is taken. The implication is that only outcomes (injuries and illnesses) are responded to. Thus, the reac- tive approach never attacks the root causes of these outcomes. Many employers respond only to that which has already happened and never look at what is causing an injury or illness to develop. Clearly, this approach is contraindicated if a management program that works is in existence.

A program that has plan-ahead features, such as hazard inspections and more detailed job hazard analyses, is capable of identifying physical,

8 chapter 1 introduction: what is workplace safety?

chemical, biological, and ergonomic as well as psychological and opera- tional hazards and of mitigating them prior to adverse outcomes. As you might suspect, the ability to identify and mitigate these hazards is the hall- mark of better-than-average workplace safety plans.

Workplace safety management does include planning—planning for resources (whether people or materials) and all of the activities that go along with maintaining a management program. Once marshaled, these resources, particularly the organization’s human resources, require utiliza- tion. All human resources must be “playing from the same page and sheet of music” regarding workplace safety management. If this is not the case, then a discordant program effort will follow, with the result being injuries and illnesses.

The leadership associated with workplace safety programs actually can come from several sources. However, it is absolutely essential that a great deal of program leadership be vested with the individual or individuals who actually oversee the program and are held accountable for its results. To put it simply, those who are the consumers of the program—the employees—require a very clear picture of who’s in charge.

Because workplace safety programs require resources, they must be orga- nized to obtain peak efficiencies. The first three management elements typ- ically are linked to the strategic aspects of a workplace safety program. The tactical aspects traditionally are tied to the management element of control. This link is fairly simple, since the tactical aspects of workplace safety plans include training, incident investigations, hazard identification, and hazard control.

Workplace safety management requires program planning and resource availability. It also requires active leadership and organization to assure con- sistent deployment. In addition, workplace safety management requires controlling exposures to injury and illness. This criterion further delineates what workplace safety management is: those tactics that are implemented to reduce and, whenever possible, eliminate the factors that allow injuries and illnesses to develop. These factors are found in both unsafe acts and unsafe conditions.

Workplace safety management programs are not self-written or self- sustaining. As with many other programs, as they are integrated within the fabric of an organization and nurtured, it is much easier to maintain them and ensure that they are having a meaningful impact.

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