What to do when a safety standard doesn’t fit the task

What happens when a worker is injured and you find that a standard was not followed?

Do you point a finger at the worker or supervisor?  Maybe you take a systems view and try to improve your management system.   But, what if the standard was not suitable for the specific task being performed?

As we work with more and more clients doing Task Based Risk Assessment, we continue to document the variation in jobs and tasks.  A job with a Job Safety Analysis, Standard Operating Procedure or other instruction that prescribes the proper and safe way to do a job often does not work for a seemingly similar task because the circumstances and conditions may not be the same.  This particularly true of work for:

• Set-up and changeover
• Maintenance
• Adjustments with power on
• Diagnostic and trouble shooting

Safety has done a pretty decent job of documenting best practices and standardized work for operators.  However, the myriad tasks involved with the work listed above often does not lend itself to having a standard for every single task because you will drown in non–value added paper.  The variation in the work is something that you typically cannot change due to machine, operation or facility design.

Lockout is excellent as a standard means of protection but floor people know there is usually considerable diagnostic work to perform before the machine can be shut down and locked out.  Those are the situations where standards don’t work.

Count on trained, responsible workers

Assuming that workers have been trained and have the required skill set, we need to count on them to be responsible and accountable for their actions.  Particularly in situations where there are teams, power on, climbing, etc., it is important for employees to step back and use critical thinking to make sure they – and their colleagues – are safe while doing the necessary work.  In such cases, the simple Plan, Do, Check, Act model of continuous improvement that is the foundation of ANSI Z10 (US National Standard for Occupational H&S Management Systems) is useful as a tactical floor tool.  We should ask employees to:

Plan –Do they recognize the hazards and task requirements for all concerned in the work?

Do – “Do” is actually a pilot before the real work begins – make sure the plan will work. (If you must initiate machine motion for diagnostic purposes, do so with everyone in a safe position.)

Check – Validate the “Do” (Did the machine move as the team expected?)

Act – Act is get on with the work, “Adjust” the Plan or “Abandon” and make a new plan.

Respecting employees as thinking adults, we would be well served to arm them with critical  thinking skills rather than searching for a non-existent standard or a standard that is not suitable to the task at hand.