Occupational Safety and Health Management

Summary

The core aim of all occupational health and safety initiatives is to support a safe working environment. Reports indicate that approximately 200 people lose their lives every year in workplace accidents while millions are injured or suffer from workplace diseases. Therefore, incorporating workers’ compensation is very important in order to meet their safety and health needs. Injured workers lead to huge losses to the firm because they fail to produce enough performance. Promotion of safety and health in workplaces involves physical, mental and social well-being of employees. Hazard analysis involves four main stages. These steps include choosing the job or work to be analyzed and then categorizing the job into a sequence of steps. It also encompasses recognizing potential hazards and deliberating on measures to prevent and overcome these hazards. Performance measures concentrate on what to accomplish tasks, but not how to accomplish me. There are different types and sizes of measure. These include objectives, key performance indicators or levels of performances. Occupational safety and health trainings are needed because of personal accidents and injuries happening in workplaces. Accidents and injuries at work place are very costly to a firm because they reduce performance of employees. They also cause salary loss, increase workers compensation cost and medical expenses. Total worker health is an approach of incorporating workplace health and safety protection with health promotion aiming to prevent illnesses and injuries and advance well-being and health.

Introduction

Workplace safety and health management is a core issue which protects the welfare, health and safety of persons engaged in labor of any type. The main aim of all occupational health and safety initiatives is to nurture a safe working environment. In this respect, the management should offer a safe premises, supervision and training, instructions, information, safe work systems and safe materials and machinery. Ultimately, it will help to increase safety and facilitate a suitable facility and physical working environment (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin & Lin, 2014, p. 1). In the workplace, an approach that facilitates Occupational Safety and Health operations in a proactive way should be in place. Reports indicate that approximately 200 people are killed every year in workplace accidents while millions are injured or suffer from workplace diseases. Incorporating proactive work activities and prevention must be the main concerns of everybody at their workplaces. There are many benefits of workplace safety, such as workforce protection and good health (Olson & Winchester, 2008, p. 7).

The biggest responsibility of OH & S officer is to perform a well-coordinated identification of hazard. Besides, it should concentrate on exhaustive risk assessment. In this regard, it can provide the foundation of risk management, which is ultimately to mitigate risk or if possible to eliminate it. Risk assessment and hazard identification have two core aspects of task performance (Wilkins, 2011, p. 9). Physical condition appraisal involves considering where people work. Moreover, appraisal of the way encompasses people’s behaviors or act when working. The behaviors of employees when working offer more potential risks and hazards to the workers.

Workers are the most valuable resources a company can have (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 4). Therefore, incorporating workers’ compensation is very important in order to meet their safety and health needs. Injured workers cause huge losses to the firm because it fails to produce enough. The employers total cost of the core workplace risk and injury usually have several times the cost of their employee’ compensation premium. Therefore, a firm must carefully manage risks in order to reduce huge costs (Robson, Clarke, Cullen, Bielecky, Severin, Bigelow & Mahood, 2007, p. 5). A firm needs to have quality management and injury prevention among its workers as well as worker’s compensation claims that help to save time and money (NIOSH, 2014, p. 7). Moreover, the management should ensure the systems of safety and health is compliant and performing well in order to avoid costly penalties and fines.  A serious injury to workers coupled with the severe legal requirement, harsh penalties such as jail sentences and huge workers’ compensation premiums cause significant cost to a firm (Beddoe, 2012, p. 2). The majority of organization understands that to evade avoidable unwanted and downtime costs, it should have an efficient occupational health and safety practices and an all-inclusive employees’ compensation package.

Many small and medium sized companies experience challenges in incorporating an effective occupation safety and health package within limited time and resources as well as employee compensation practices (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p.8). The biggest challenge is how to manage the risks in a definite and systematic manner where the business will make profits. In addition, workers face a wide range of workplace risks, which makes it difficult for business to address them at once (McInerney, 2010, p. 3).

A business need to establish a systematic strategy of identifying main risks that need to be reduced through both long and short term measures (Masanja, Lutambi, & Khatib, 2012, p. 2). In the contemporary market, it is not adequate to depend on the past claim encounter to acquire a realistic premium rate for employees’ compensation insurance. Companies with proper procedures and processes in place are in a position to minimize workers’ compensation cost of their operations (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 3). Therefore, these processes and procedures should have hazard reporting process and inspection procedures in workplaces.

Moreover, in order to reduce workers’ compensation, a firm should have safe working practices, safety training and induction programs (Beddoe, 2012, p. 3). A business should create loss control approaches by developing return to work packages. The approach should also have an honest and open dialogue with an injured employee and examiner of claims. Moreover, there should be clear procedures for incident management and programs for visitors and contractor management (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 7). Furthermore, it is very crucial that a business should invest in strategies for managing the employees’ compensation claims. Most importantly, all occupational and safety official should ensure that these procedures are executed in the right manner and monitored actively.

A safe workplace has a significant effect on the productivity of employees as well as reducing costs. Therefore, when there is a safe working environment, it helps to manage workers’ compensation costs (Beddoe, 2012, p. 3). If there are fewer claims and losses, it will ultimately cause a lower modification of experience that saves huge sums of money for the business.

Promotion of safety and health in workplaces involves physical, mental and social well-being of employees, and all these factors make the “whole person.” A firm needs to learn from the experiences and establish plans for a better future (Wilkins, 2011, p. 12). Hazard analysis is a crucial procedure that assists in incorporating acceptable health and safety practices and principles into a specific job or task operation. In hazard analysis, every step is considered a potential hazard which aims to advocate safety approach to perform the job (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 3). Safety is an integral part of every work and not a distinct unit. The benefits of hazard analysis are that it does not depend on a person’s memory and the process involves hazard recognition. Supervisors and experienced workers conduct the analysis via discussion. Therefore, it engages many people in a wider experience base, enhancing a ready acceptance of the procedures at workplace. It helps joint health and safety committee members to participate in the processes (Olson & Winchester, 2008, p. 6). Hazard analysis helps to recognize undetected hazards that were not detected previously, hence, increases job knowledge to workers. Health and safety awareness are increasing, improvement in communication between supervisors and workers and there is a promotion of acceptable safe working processes and procedures (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 4).

Hazard analysis promotes safety of workers by creating a regular contact between workers and supervisors. It acts as a teaching aid for preliminary job training. Moreover, it serves as a briefing guide for jobs that are infrequent. Therefore, it works as a standard for safety and health observation and inspections (Wilkins, 2011, p. 14). Indeed, hazard analysis will help a company to complete elaborate accident investigations.

Hazard analysis involves four main stages. These steps include, choosing the job or work to be analyzed and then categorizing the job into a sequence of steps. It also encompasses recognizing potential hazards and deliberating on measures to prevent and overcome these hazards. In selecting work to be analyzed, a firm should set priorities on the jobs that have frequent accidents and that cause fatal injuries (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 6). They need to analyze their potential to illnesses and severe injuries such as accident consequences, harmful substance exposure and hazardous conditions (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p.4). Furthermore, newly created jobs should be assessed. Due to this reason, lack of experience of a specific job may increase chances of hazards which are anticipated.  Fresh hazards may be linked with modified jobs or new procedures. Moreover, the jobs that are infrequently performed have a higher chance of a risk when carrying out no-routine assignment.

Following choosing of jobs that require hazard analysis, the next activity involves categorizing these jobs into stages. In this respect steps should be documented that helps to describe how the job would be performed. The steps should follow a certain sequence. Part of the analysis is supervising the employees perform the job (Beddoe, 2012, p.5).  In every step, all potential hazards are identified and recorded. More attention should be put in ever-available hazard. After the process, preventive measures should be put in place. These include hazard elimination, containment, revising work procedures and exposure reduction (Ding, Qu, Yu, & Wang, 2014, p.6). The most efficient method of eliminating a hazard is by selecting another process or modifying a prevailing process. In addition, it involves replacing with a less hazardous substances or improving the environment through ventilation. The occupational safety and health officer should change or modify tools or equipment. Workers should be advised to reduce the contact of the hazard if workers booths cannot eliminate it, applying enclosures and machine guards (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 12). They need to consider using a different step sequence or by utilizing extra steps such as reducing energy sources.

Reducing the exposure of a hazard should be implemented by reducing the number of times for exposure of the hazard. Employees should use appropriate personal protective equipment. In addition, emergency facilities should be in place in order to minimize the severity of an accident (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 8). They should also learn to be cautious and careful. Information should also be accessible to all people.

Performance measures are set of results-based factors or times of responses that helps to analyze success. Performance measures concentrates on what tasks should be accomplished but not how to accomplish them. There are different types and sizes of measures. These include objectives, key performance indicators or levels of performances (Beddoe, 2012, p. 6). Performance standards are the least acceptable performance level for a specific measure. For instance, for a fail/pass measure the goal is to pass. In the contemporary business environment, the majority of industries fully concentrates on normal safety performance measures. These include lost time, the frequency of injuries, and lost days aiming to determine the safety performance measure (McInerney, 2010, p. 7). However, such indicators do not give an appropriate indication or control of risk management activity that do take time to give necessary outcomes (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 8). Such measures of outcome are known as lagging indicators since they judge safety performance.

Using lagging indicators seeks to provide continuous improvement via incident free workplace. They only monitor the firm’s performance on the final stage of illnesses, injuries, fatalities and worker’s experience in the course of their operation.

The management should assess the process that causes failure and investigates effective control mechanisms, which prevent negative outcomes (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 13). Subsequently, it helps to improve the picture of proactive measures that reduce risks and outcomes. In this respect, a firm should initiate posit performance measures (PPM). PPM is a proactive measure that produces an appropriate control of damage and loss. Most notably, it is an upstream type of measure instead of downstream measure of outcome (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 8).  Therefore, positive performance measures play crucial role in effect risk and safety management. Firms should understand that there is no single dependable measure of safety and health performances. Most importantly, in occupational safety and health, a firm should develop a balanced scorecard that offers information on different safety and health efforts (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 9). Positive performance measures offer information on operations of systems in practice recognizes where remediation action is necessary. Furthermore, it provides a foundation for continuous perfection and gives a feedback mechanism and substantial motivation.

It is particularly crucial to know exactly what is being measured and significance of measurement on generating desired outcomes for the firm (Wilkins, 2011, p. 4). The PPM should be as error free as possible, reproducible and quantifiable as well as administratively applicable. It also helps managers who are responsible for occupational health and safety to take appropriate actions in a timely manner (Wilkins, 2011, p. 14). Managers assign indicators after identifying specific safety objectives and targets.

Occupational safety and health trainings are needed because of personal accidents and injuries happening at workplaces. Accidents and injuries at work place are very costly to a firm because they reduce performance of employees. They also cause salary loss; increase workers compensation cost and medical expenses (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 15). The US congress passed legislation to ensure that every worker gets OSHA trainings to ensure that he or she is safe from illness and injuries at workplaces. Safety trainings are conducted to ensure that every worker and business owner is committed to lower the number of health hazards and safety hazards in their workplaces (Rauscher, Myers, Runyan, & Schulman, 2012. p. 6). The employees and employers have a special role and right to healthy and safe working environment. Training equips employees with more skills on ways to handle equipment and prevent hazards from causing adverse health effects. Therefore, they improve competencies of the personnel (Robson, Clarke, Cullen, Bielecky, Severin, Bigelow, & Mahood, 2007, p. 6). Workers are also trained on appropriate procedures that explain the occupational health and safety that promote a healthy environment (Beddoe, 2012, p. 7). It also assists in strengthening safety culture and reduces related costs.

In every occupation, it is crucial that operators of any equipment are adequately trained in every area of their operations. A firm has huge liabilities from making insurance premiums for injured employees. A firm needs good equipment for every job coupled with employees with adequate knowledge to operate efficiently and safely (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 1). Well-drained operators are required in industries such as construction and paper, mining where there are many hazards due to activity and location. Many workers use workplaces as their alternative homes in order not to waste their time. Therefore, maintenance, health and safe working environment should be a serious responsibility of employers as well as workers (McInerney, 2010, p. 2).

Manufacturers of equipment should provide adequate training for every equipment they are installing in a firm. Training programs are organized in specific groups of different sizes and levels of knowledge (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 8). Training courses include written evaluation, discussion materials, practical segments and questions and answer periods. Following successful completion of this course, workers should receive a certificate.

Research revealed that efficient safety training programs could decrease work-related accidents by more than 70 percent. Every person in an industry remains aware of the working environment and government regulations to ensure they maintain safer environment. The aspect of safety generates financial benefit to a company because it influences the bottom line both indirectly and directly (Beddoe, 2012, p. 4). Cost related to injuries and incidents such as claims on worker’s compensation, lost opportunity cost, insurance costs as well as legislation fees are decreased in an environment that is safe. Indirect cost associated with such cases includes productivity loss when employees focus their attention dealing with the incident and schedule interruptions (Takala, Hämäläinen, Saarela, Yun, Manickam, Jin, & Lin, 2014, p. 9). When employees are working in a safe environment, they feel like they are making a difference and lead to work quality improvement, less staff turnover and fewer staff absences. The benefits of a safe environment go beyond financial benefits of a firm as it boosts morale.

Total worker health is an approach of incorporating workplace health and safety protection with health promotion aiming to prevent illnesses and injuries and advance well-being and health. The improvement, preservation and protection of the well-being and health of all persons are the responsibility of workers, employers and their families (Wilkins, 2011, p. 5). Research clearly indicates that overall safety, health and well-being of employees and work environment are strongly connected. Poor health and injury resulting from work or non-occupational activates minimizes the quality of life, workers’ income and opportunities and cause suffering for their dependent (Whye Lian, Nelbon, Ching Thon, & Jac Fang, 2012, p. 5). In the contrary, workplace higher chances of total worker health and low risk areas increases performance and workers become vibrant and engaged.

Many programs for promoting health concentrate on safety, minimizing exposure of workers to risk factors in work environment. In addition, health promotion programs focus entirely on lifestyle factors that affect workers outside their working environment (Beddoe, 2012, p. 3). Therefore, when health promotion programs and health protection are integrated, they produce a wholesome worker able to work effectively. The focus of total worker health is to maintain safe working environment for employers, employees and their families (NIOSH, 2014, p. 5).

Firms are able to save costs and improve them after implementing integrated health promotion and protection management programs. These programs follow the specifications of total worker health (Masanja, Lutambi, & Khatib, 2012, p. 3).

Conclusion

When a firm implements Occupational Health and safety management system, a firm facilitates safe organization and efficient health that facilitates good health and worker safety. Occupational health and safety aims to provide a systematic approach depending its goals. The working processes are implemented, organized, controlled and planned relative to other management tasks. OSHMS boosts the morale of workers and cooperatively work to avoid risks and hazards. Occupational health and safety help the firm achieve economically by reducing expenses. It also increases productivity, reduce absenteeism, accidents, and fewer downtimes (Houvouras & Harvey, 2014, p. 3). Moreover, the programs increase awareness and safety and also improves competitive advantage of a firm. For a firm to successfully implement occupational health and safety, total worker health strategy should be an integral part of its operation. The strategy helps to build synergy and promote well-being and health of employees, their families as well as employers (Ding, Qu, Yu, & Wang, 2014, p. 9). Employees who work under safe and healthy environment enjoy mental health, management of stress and increase in job satisfaction.

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