Regardless of time, place or complexity of tasks, good employers strive to have competent workers performing all their work activities. That is, they try to utilize workers with the requisite skills and experience who are fully qualified to function in particular ways, safely. It gets the work done correctly and just makes sense. Firms who don’t, usually cease to exist quickly. The necessity to use competent workers is one of those market requirements contributing towards survival of the fittest. Competent workers are great as they can properly and efficiently complete the required tasks on a job. Incompetent or inexperienced workers are often more of a liability than any cost savings that might result from usually lower wages.
Even when using the most competent workers, safety still remains a major challenge for employers. That is why the Job Safety Analysis (JSA) also called Activity Hazard Analysis (AHA) is simply an essential tool for guiding and promoting safe behaviors in the workplace, and the best news is that tool is inexpensive. A quick way to learn how easy it is to create your own Job Safety Analysis is test the time-proven tools at www.JSABuilder.com, a great resource all employers should utilize. This tool is an easy to use database driven customizable template where the user creates custom Job Safety Analyses that are available to be accessed by their distributed workforce. Once a Job Safety Analysis, some might also refer to as Job Hazard Analysis (JHA), is created, they reside in a secure library where they can be used as the bases for modification for new or different jobs. It’s worthwhile for employers to invest the time and thought to modify/create Job Safety Analyses in JSABuilder’s simple and efficient process, but how else could you get documents addressing all the needs of your projects?
A well thought out Job Safety Analysis will focus every worker’s attention on thinking through to understand each and every activity in advance of starting a job. This tool can also help identify project/task issues that could be critical to worker safety and/or proper estimation of costs to complete the work. When it’s time to start work, having a Job Safety Analysis is the key to conducting team job reviews to think through the potential risks that could be encountered while performing each task. Often, many of the day to day activities workers are involved with may be redundant tasks, which are always a concern from a safety standpoint. The team may conduct some of those redundant type activities so often that they find the tasks boring causing difficultly maintaining concentration. As their concentration relaxes, complacency sets in and safety is put at risk. These redundant activities are often routine tasks that workers may be convinced that they don’t need to worry about. There’s a feeling of uncritical self-satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements, which lead to an unawareness of actual dangers and risks. Often these risks manifest themselves in the field when complacent workers fail to observe that site conditions have changed from the perceived conditions that were anticipated initially.
Before beginning work, the Job Safety Analysis provides a great tool to support conversations involving all competent and inexperienced workers to review potential task risks and the mitigating responses to reduce risks. These conversations help reduce complacency by focusing the work team on the current conditions at task locations which may be different than those perceived when organizing the job, or maybe they change on a daily basis. The JSA in supporting the identification of changed conditions can help the work team to develop and agree on mitigations at the worksite, which can be immediately documented with a management of change (MOC) annotation right on the JSA. That facilitates getting everybody to work on their tasks safely, in an efficient manner. Performing these MOC steps during reviews help to keep all team members engaged in thinking about the work tasks and help eliminate opportunities for complacency to ruin someone’s day. A JSA worksheet provides employers so much value so inexpensively, it’s difficult to understand why anyone would not use a Job Safety Analysis for every project task.
Go to www.JSAbuilder.com and test this JHA software out for free, and help your team work safely and go home at the end of each work day without harm. Also follow us on Twitter @JSABuilder, where we tweet about Health and Safety, post Safety tips, and provide updates on current Health and Safety topics.