by Brianna Crandall — May 12, 2014—The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) recently highlighted two articles from the April and May issues of its monthly Professional Safety journal that should be of interest to both safety professionals and facilities/workplace professionals who often deal with safety. One concerns the challenges of harnessing the potential of safety management systems, and the other gives tips on how to handle workers’ perception of being invulnerable to harm.
“Safety Management Systems, Comparing Content & Impact”
As more companies shift to using safety management systems to monitor their occupational health and safety programs, ASSE says the potential they hold may be lost if not properly integrated or measured against set goals. That is the warning in the lead article of the May issue of Professional Safety, titled “Safety Management Systems, Comparing Content & Impact,” written by Joel Haight, Patrick Yorio, Kristen Rost and Dana Willmer.
The advantage of using an occupational health and safety management system (OSHMS) is the ability for a system-wide record-keeping, document control and integrated tracking in one place. This consistency allows for sound, cost-effective, risk-reducing interventions that are consistent with overall system objectives, points out the article.
However, proper planning is needed to ensure a company captures the correct data. “In the planning process, an organization must first identify and prioritize its risks, then develop plans necessary to minimize this risk, set performance objectives, and facilitate management buy-in and employee ownership,” the authors write.
In terms of measuring effectiveness, an organization can rely on many of the intervention activities that make up existing safety programs to form the foundation of OSHMS implementation. The state of the available research is such that anyone can determine what variables indicate OSHMS performance, and can determine how best to quantify and measure those variables, the article states.
According to ASSE, no matter how many safety training courses emphasis how dangerous it may be to work with electricity, chemicals or cargo unless proper safety protocols are followed, there is always a percentage of employees who believe they are not vulnerable to such risks—until it is too late.
Those types of perceptions need to be changed before injuries or fatalities prove them wrong, say authors Anna Floyd and H. Landis Floyd II in an article in the April issue of the journal, titled “The Value of Vulnerability.” Safety professionals must ensure their training courses go beyond statistics in conveying how to properly manage risk.
“Safety training…without a focus on risk susceptibility and severity is a disservice to workers,” the authors write. “A worker’s perception that s/he has a low likelihood of suffering a nonfatal electrical burn is accurate, yet among those who are involved in such an electrical incident, their likelihood of being killed is high. This discrepancy raises an important point about how people conceptualize risk.”
Whatever beliefs employees may have about their own vulnerability, the authors encourage safety professionals to incorporate stories in their training sessions as a way to personalize potentially dangerous situations to them.
“Stories about people affected by incidents that include photos, names and references to personable characteristics will persuade much more than simply presenting statistics,” the article states. “The more a worker can relate to a story’s character, the more likely s/he is to be transported and affected by that story, and the more likely s/he will be to think ‘that could be me.'”
