When an occupational health and safety officer comes to your work site that is usually part of an inspection blitz or there has been a complaint to the organization by one of your employees or the unthinkable has happened – you had an incident and you are involved in damage control.
You should always extend all cooperation that you can to an officer. Make sure that an experienced supervisor or manager takes the officer around and accompanies him. Make sure that you have your workers available for interviews and you have documents available unless you have client solicitor privilege with incident investigations which is a technique which I have talked about earlier in some of my other programs. You want to ensure you provide every cooperation, that the officer is managed and their impact on the organization because in occupational health and safety law you are guilty and you have to prove due diligence that you have done everything reasonable and practical to protect the health and safety of your employees.
Never ever hide the evidence. You have got to provide it even if it is damning you have got to make sure that the evidence is left undisturbed because the fines are very severe for providing barriers or preventing an officer from doing his/her job. They have a lot of power. You have got to respect the power. You have got to mitigate the officer’s effects on your company’s operations.
If you are doing a good health and safety program that should withstand the scrutiny of an officer because due diligence cannot be parachuted in. As I have talked about time and time again you often either have it or you don’t. If you don’t have a good health and safety program then it can be an impetus for putting one together very quickly after an officer has left and they have made the necessary recommendations or you have been fined.
So in most cases you should not be fined when an officer shows up. Often it is informational only and orders are written and you work to mitigate and put in remedial actions to what the officer suggests because this is based on legislation and legislation is the bare minimum and it can change.
The legislation is undergoing a review in 2013 and every five years hence it will undergo review so make sure that you stay current either by employing a health and safety consultant like myself or ensuring that your health and safety people are current and practical and have the knowledge to do an effective job for you and assist you. When an officer shows up your health and safety person as well should accompany the supervisor or manager in question. They are an important resource and if you don’t have a health and safety person then that is the time you should employ a consultant such as myself.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t have a little gratuitous self-promotion. A really good time to contact a health and safety consultant such as myself is when the officer walks in the door because I can do a lot to reduce his/her impact on your organization and position you for success so you get orders or you get a minimization of fines because of my expertise and my assistance which will assist you in meeting the officer’s requirements and also demands.
