Advance Your Team's Safety Behavior
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Building Safety Awareness
Safety is an important aspect to everything we do, but safety does not just happen, it requires a conscious effort on the part of all individuals involved in any activity. We should all invest in building on our good past safety practices to develop better safety habits going forward 24 x 7. None of us can simply turn on safety awareness behavior when we arrive at work, we need to subconsciously and consciously be thinking about potential risks and their safety mitigations continually. All of us will benefit from extending our work safety habits and procedures into our after-work personal lives. Avoidable accidents at home often can potentially affect our work lives and careers as much as our families. At home performing chores or during recreation we often end up involved in activities where it is easy to ignore safety considerations in favor of shortcuts, where during working hours, we would hopefully have done a job safety analysis (JSA) and mitigated the risks to the extent possible prior to starting.
Remember, safety is about continuous improvement. One of the best risk assessment and mitigation tools available to support improvement of projects everywhere is JSA Builder, conveniently offered at jsabuilder.com. This is a user-friendly, inexpensive tool for preparing Job Safety Analyses (JSA) or Hazard Safety Analyses (HSA). If a safety strategy is available for your planned work, then all of the required plans and potential risks that have been identified can be used to develop the appropriate written safety plans and documents which are records of how an entity plans to protect its employees involved in the work from potential safety or health hazards.
Risk Analysis and Management of Change
Workers need to think about and consider safety all day long and at work you should encourage staff to embrace behavior where they perform risk analyses of some type for every activity they perform. They need to maintain a level of awareness at all times. Some analyses will be very quick and simple and can be done on the spot. More importantly, for more complex tasks, the analyses may be complicated and detailed, which may require a more formal process.
Prior to performing the task(s), once the mitigations have been developed and agreed upon, it is necessary to communicate the reduced risk mitigation plan of action to your team. At that time, if anticipated conditions have changed then a management of change (MOC) process should be followed to mitigate any unforeseen risks. Depending on the scope, this can be a process that is documented with annotations to the JSA, or it can be a formal process where a MOC document is prepared with the mitigations communicated to the team. The result of this process is usually completion of the planned work efficiently and more importantly, safely. Well thought out plans almost always result in savings to the end user.
Extending Safety Beyond the Workplace
After work, your staff will hopefully continue using good safety practices and that will be a benefit to them, their families, and their employer. It is truly a win-win situation.
To assist your team in developing a 24 x 7 safety culture, and to efficiently plan details of the next project including risk assessing planned work tasks, try JSABuilder free. Find out what thousands of current users have already proved — this outstanding JHA/JSA software tool will help your team work safely and go home at the end of each work day without harm. If you have a distributed workforce, they can use JSABuilder to create a library of JSAs which are then available online to be modified and shared across your team.
JSABuilder helps your team build better safety habits with easy-to-create Job Safety Analyses.
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