Adjusting During A Pandemic: Skepticism Abounds – It Can’t Happen to Me… or Can it?
This blog utilizes research and data from a range of professional safety journals (i.e., Professional Safety) and research reports, and blends it with economic realities and common company leadership expectations. It is written as a series for those who are new to safety or have an expanded role within safety. It is meant to be easily digestible by reviewing one to two key points.
Lastly, this blog does not intend to be the end all, but is designed to mentor by overviewing basic safety program organization and key concepts.
The Changes That Just Occurred
Due to the Pandemic, the Safety Director you reported to for the past 15 years has taken an early retirement package. As the company adjusts to the Pandemic economy, they have promoted you from your plant to be the new Safety Lead for the company. So you are now the front line for creating safety policies and programs. In addition, your new boss, is also new to their position of COO and has come from finance.
The Challenges You Now Face
You are discussing a near miss and your new boss says what is the big deal, nothing happened! You are walking the floor with a plant manager and you both observe a worker or contractor not following a work instruction and they say back to you what is the big deal nothing happened!
This pandemic has brought to the forefront the challenges of risk assessment – the process of identifying hazards and determining consequences. If there is an exposure to a hazard and no immediate or substantial consequence, then people can begin to doubt the cause/effect relationship. It can make the creation or enforcement of rules a challenge and it certainly makes the process of risk assessment more challenging. Due to current events, it may be difficult to gain consensus for the probability of an exposure and a consequence or severity due to that exposure.
Your Opportunity
These two examples highlight the challenges of safety – if there is an exposure to a hazard and nothing happened, then how do you teach and motivate regarding potential consequences and the safeguards intend to protect employees from those hazards?
This is a complex topic that safety professionals have been writing about for several decades. This blog intends to provide a brief summary to start the education process. This initial information can be used to help make a business case for conducting risk assessment training and implementation.
The objective of this work is to drive consensus on 1) assessing risks and 2) apply the appropriate level of controls to bring risks to acceptable levels. It does not matter whether it is an office, data center, factory, warehouse/distribution, laboratory, utility work, etc, the risk assessment process is applicable and should be applied to all types work.
There will be three steps discussed, the first in this Part 1 and the second and third in Part 2.
The first step is to identify and evaluate the hazards in the operation that pose an immediate threat to life safety and to inventory them. This is accomplished by assembling a cross functional team and promoting robust discussions about where and when employees and/or contractors could be expected to be exposed to hazards with the current safety measures in-place (i.e., engineering controls, administrative controls, and PPE).
Now what does the phrase “expected to be exposed” really mean? It means exposures during normal operation and expected maintenance (i.e., tooling changes, adjustments) or in other terms, standard work.
There can be far more exposures to hazards during non-standard work, during construction or non-routine maintenance activities that are infrequent, hard to predict, etc. This topic of non-standard work will be addressed in subsequent blogs.
Examples of hazards and their current controls that could lead to an injury or a fatality are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Hazard and Current Safety Controls
What other hazards could your workforce be subjected to? For those considering implementing the ISO 45001 Health and Safety Management System, creating a hazards analysis is one of the initial work products.
What other hazards could your workforce be subjected to? For those considering implementing the ISO 45001 Health and Safety Management System, creating a hazards analysis is one of the initial work products.
If you have questions or need help regarding distracted driving or anything safety related, please reach out to FDRsafety.
