We all love calendars. They can be very effective at managing our days, our weeks, our months and all of the routine things we do at work.
We pay bills a certain day every month. We conduct safety checks the same week of every month or the same day every week.The company has donuts in the break room the same day every month and nothing the rest of the month.
[Image courtesy of USDAgov from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Some companies with complex work sites and varying risk factors across the board, might be better served by taking a risk-based approach to safety audits, rather than the traditional calendar-based approach.
Another thing that calendars are helpful with are regular audits, which well-run companies always order every couple or three years. The company usually keeps track and notifies everyone of an upcoming audit and how it is important to make sure everyone is following the policies and procedures as needed to ensure a positive audit.
But what about unannounced random audits? Would not those perhaps be more effective in discovering risk before it becomes a breeding ground for incidents?
James Burk and Janet Henry recently wrote in Professional Safety magazine (June 2014) about the benefits and challenges of a calendar-based audit approach vs. a risk-based approach – where instead of auditing all sites every couple of years, resources are geared toward auditing those high-risk sites more often to ensure compliance and that proper workplace health and safety protocols are effective.
With some companies, this idea makes sense – why give auditing resources for a full audit of a sales office of a home-builder, while a development construction site is basically left alone and workers are at risk much more on a daily basis?
Not to pay any disrespect to paper cuts in the office setting, but let’s be realistic. A construction site will have more risk factors than a sales office, so it can make more sense for that particular company to use its limited auditing resources more often at the high-risk sites.
Burk and Murphy discuss this risk-based approach to auditing by talking about the differences between risk-based and calendar-based audits and they laid out a game plan of how to set up an audit plan based on risks and how to determine what work sites should be audited more frequently.
Some of the suggested measurements to consider include likelihood factors such as the size of the work site (a site with 500 employees will likely have a higher risk than one with 20 employees), turnover in key positions (if the site has lost a couple of safety officers in the last 18 months, that could lead to safety gaps), how much interaction there is between humans and machines, and what environmental risks are on hand at a site (does the site handle chemicals or have a large amount of wastewater?). In addition, some input factors that could be measured to determine risk include recordable incident rate at a site, the lost-time rate due to accidents or incidents and records of noncompliance or issued citations. From there, sites could be moved up or down the list based on if they have ever been audited before or if their audit was recent (e.g. within the last six to nine months, for example).
A matrix could then be established measuring sites with high likelihood or high input, or both, to determine the priority for site audits.If a company were going on a three-year cycle in the past, then a construction site could be audited every year for safety, while a sales office might see an audit every four or five years. This may really come down to how important safety truly is for a company; it’s one thing to say “safety first,” but a risk-based approach to safety audits would mean the company truly backs up its words. And employees will be healthier, safer and more productive at work in the long run.