Organizations are composed of people, equipment, tools and processes. Organizations have to have a balance between all of these elements in order to improve their health and safety readiness.
Human beings have to have the right attitude and behaviors in order to practice health and safety. Sometimes though the attitude isn’t there but the behavior is and you deal with the behavior rather than the attitude because you can measure behavior but you can’t measure attitude, at least not very readily. So you want to make sure that your employees work safe: basically that they wear the necessary PPE, that they think before they act and they don’t take shortcuts.
The equipment has to have engineered control measures in place. You have to have guarding on pinch points where you can stick your hands in to get cut or punctured. The equipment should have guarding in place and if it doesn’t you are going to have to retrofit the guarding and make sure that it is in place to eliminate the fact that people can hurt themselves if this is not in place. You want to have it as foolproof as possible knowing of course that making things foolproof is very difficult because fools are very, very smart at getting hurt.
So the human factor you can ensure that people follow the rules, have standards and policies in place which show the behaviors you want from your employees and senior management has to model these and management has to have discipline in place to ensure that it happens. The equipment that the employees work at has to be well maintained, work well and it must be appropriate to what people are doing. You don’t want them to use equipment in ways that was not intended.
So by ensuring that the human factor is in place and by making sure that your equipment is well maintained and taken care of you can enhance health and safety in your organization and ensure that the two work together synergistically to improve health and safety in a huge, huge fashion. The two work together; make sure they are in balance, fine-tuned and lubricated with excellent policies and procedures in your health and safety program to ensure that your program works in an optimal fashion.
By the way, I’d be remiss not to talk about processes in the working environment, which much like a jigsaw puzzle fits together to build a strong health and safety management system. Processes are things such as communication, training and execution, implementation of your health and safety program. It is key that you implement what you have learned so that you can prevent losses. It is key that you have good management/worker communications. Health and safety committees are huge with this. They can assist you greatly. It is key that you have good training processes both on the job and also formal and informal training. The working environment is key too. Your environment is a critical area of this in any health and safety program. It is essential that you do good hazard assessments to ensure that all the hazards in the working environment are known, controlled and you can prevent losses in that manner and you monitor any hazards in the working environment by a good inspection process. So these are really essential keys together with equipment and tools and also with the human factor to ensure that your health and safety program is simply world-class and covers all the bases because it is the little things that will trip you up. It is the little details that make the difference between an average health and safety program and a great one.
