Management needs to be on board with health and safety plan

By Bob Carruth
Risk Control Manager

Last month, I provided an overview of ANSI Z10, the voluntary consensus standard approved in 2005 for health and safety management systems. This standard provides for a common platform to implement and maintain a health and safety management system. This month, we will look at the management leadership and employee participation portion of the standard in more detail.

S 3.1.1 of the standard reads: "Top management shall direct the organization to establish, implement and maintain an OHSMS [Occupational Health & Safety Management System]."

It is widely known that a health and safety program in any organization will not succeed without the support of the top management. These are the key components:

Health and safety policy: It is rare that you find a manager who does not care about the well-being of his or her employees; a person of this mentality does not last long in a management or leadership role. The real issue in most organizations is how the intent of the manager is communicated to the organization. What is needed is a short, concise statement, signed by the senior manager – whether that is the county manager or the chair of the board of commissioners.

The statement should lay out, at a minimum, four basic commitments: continual improvement of the health and safety process; employee involvement; safety policies to be followed; and laws and regulations regarding health and safety to be complied with.

Once approved, the statement should be published and distributed throughout the organization so all employees can see the organizational intent, thereby establishing a base from which the rest of the program can be built.

Responsibility and accountability: In addition to publishing a health and safety policy, management is also responsible for establishing and maintaining the momentum of the process. Many organizations' health and safety processes have been sidelined, primarily due to inadequate or inconsistent attention. Things tend to move from a state of order to disorder. That's why management systems exist – to counter this. Without constant monitoring and attention by senior management, the safety process will tend to lose its momentum over time.

Responsibility includes the commitment of resources to the process, including financial, human capital and time. Many studies have shown that the investment in an effective health and safety process can pay dividends in the form of lower insurance costs, improved productivity and increased employee morale.

An effective health and safety process must also establish clear roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. These include clear, measurable accountabilities for department heads and supervisors, metrics that will be used to measure success, how a commitment to health and safety is measured as part of the annual evaluation process, and who is responsible for particular elements of the overall process.

Finally, the health and safety process must be integrated into other management processes. It is much simpler to use existing management policies, processes and protocols for the management of the health and safety program. This also reduces the pitfall of "we just don't have enough time right now to spend on our safety process." If it is seen as an integrated part of the overall management goals and priorities, there will be time.

The other aspect of this first section involves employee participation in the management of the organization's health and safety program. Although senior management support is the most critical component in the success of the organization's health and safety process, employee participation runs a close second.

Employees should be involved in the overall planning, implementation and auditing of the health and safety process in the organization. This can be done by including them on safety committees, task forces and audit teams.

Employees should be provided with information regarding the safety performance of the organization. OSHA already requires that employees be notified each year of the organization's safety performance; notification is also required for any chemicals that are used in the workplace. Other information that could be provided to employees includes the outcome of any incident investigations, reports of safety inspections, or minutes of safety committee meetings.

Finally, management must be diligent in identifying and removing barriers that prevent full participation by employees in the health and safety process. Most of the time, these barriers are due to competing priorities placed on the time of a department or employee. Management must be diligent to keep communication lines open to employees in regards to the health and safety system, as well as making participation in safety-related activities a priority.

Although these items are essential to establish the foundation for an effective health and safety process, they are often overlooked. Many times, organizations that have recurring safety-related issues can improve their safety performance by addressing these strategies up front to clarify and establish a future roadmap for success. Next month, we will look at the second component of an effective health and safety management system: planning.