Page 117 - Occupational Health & Safety, September 2017

safety and remain engaged to continue to work safely if the environment around them is well-lit, orderly, and properly maintained and if signage clearly indicates safety requirements and expectations and employees are provided with high-quality safety equipment and personal protective equipment, when necessary.
Third-Party Evaluation
Provides a Benchmark
To begin to understand where a facility is in its journey to provide a safe environment, it makes sense to engage a third party to visit a workplace, provide an unbiased facility safety evaluation, and gauge the safety culture of the organization through safety behavior observation and employee interviews. Too often a company func- tions under the “we’ve always done it this way” mantra or has become blind to unsafe working conditions or hazards hidden in plain sight. Safety consultants, insurance representatives, corporate safety teams, OSHA compliance specialists, industry peers, and other companies that participate in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) are well equipped to conduct a safety audit to provide a company with a bench- mark, indicating where the company can improve or where it excels.
A comprehensive safety analysis should not be limited to the facility. It should also include a review of all tasks and processes, giving priority to such high-risk areas as fall protection, lockout/tagout, confined spac- es, electrical safety, lifting and rigging, and heavy equipment use, because failures in those areas can have serious consequences. Evaluate the hazards of each task and de- velop safe solutions to correct them. This means phasing out “we have always done it this way” processes and replacing them with best practices that use hazard analy- sis as a guide for development of new work processes. It also means implementing so- lutions to ensure the right equipment is be- ing used for the right job. For example, if a company is striving to prevent falls, which are consistently one of the most frequently cited OSHA violations and a serious haz- ard in any line of work, an extension ladder or makeshift scaffold may not be the best choice for workers who need to use hand tools to access a motor or filter high above the shop floor.
Employee Engagement is Key
If a company wants to have success in safety, it is critical that it actively engage its employees to ensure that a strong safety culture can survive and grow. This means sharing the vision for safety and inviting and encouraging each employee to partici- pate in shaping and achieving that vision.
Employee engagement can be accom- plished in a number of ways, beginning with the establishment of employee-led safety committees and inviting all team members to join the committees. Partici- pating in regularly scheduled meetings puts the pulse of shop floor employees in front of any safety initiative. Companies also can allow employees to become voluntary first responders who are trained in emergency first aid, CPR, the use of automated exter- nal defibrillators, and other emergency re- sponse protocols.
Other employee engagement activities also contribute to a culture of safety, among them safety poster or calendar contests that employees can share with their families, small work teams for identifying and mak- ing safety improvements through facility safety audits or safety behavior observa-
tions, safety mentor programs that assign mentors to new team members, or, in the case of JLG Industries, Inc., a Safety Action Tracker. This program tracks safety oppor- tunities as employees identify them, pro- viding a description of the item and a pho- tograph if one is available, describing the corrective action to be taken, identifying a target date for completion, and assign- ing an employee responsibility for taking the corrective action. This information is posted and available to all employees, sup- porting transparency, encouraging com- munications, and directing the appropriate resources to make a safety improvement in a timely manner.
JLG Industries also engages employees in activities designed to identify work- ers performing tasks in awkward postures or positions where ergonomics could be improved. The goal is to recognize these situations and propose solutions to remedy them. Additionally, these small work teams identify opportunities, such as maintain- ing work material within a self-regulated “power zone” of 15 to 60 inches. Known as the 15/60 rule, this rule ensures no product or materials necessary to perform a manu-
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