Safety Management Systems - Discussion and two essays
OSH 410
Week 1 Lesson 3
Management Standards as a Guide
Management standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001, OHSAS18001, or Z-10 are meant to be vague guidelines that provide the infrastructure to a safety management system. There are 4 basic elements to any formal management programs:
Management Commitment
Hazard Identification, analysis, and control,
Hazard communication,
Employee involvement and training (Kausek, 2007).
The safety program at any organization has these common elements. Do not confuse the term program with a safety compliance program. We are referring to the overall safety program. This is one reason why I personally refer to individual compliance programs as “initiatives.” But from these common elements is evident that tow levels of culture can exist within the same organization or location. A level of management commitment can contrast with the level of employee participation. If we measure the two we can measure the safety culture at an organization more accurately than traditional measures of performance.
The most definite measure of management commitment is the allocation of resources for correcting deficiencies. Any investigation, regardless of type, such as audit, hazard report, or injury investigation, produce a countermeasure in order to prevent the repeat of the occurrence. In order for the countermeasure to be implemented, all necessary resources must be allocated. This is the bottom line measure for business people. Business people typically talk in terms of dollars. Safety professionals must also learn to speak in this manner rather than relying on the leadership and humanity side of motivation for safety commitment. This means producing break even points and returns on investment for proposed safety projects. If it is important to business it is measured directly or indirectly to dollars. Hence, a closed audit, or implemented countermeasure, indicates management commitment. Looking at the overall number of closed versus open countermeasures is an accurate measure of management commitment. Other measures such as committee membership, budget numbers, or implemented standards can be misleading.
Some standard definitions may not meet your organization’s needs or fit well with your developed policies. For example; the term accident is defined in OHSAS 18001 as an undesirable event that leads to injury, death, ill health, or other loss. The term “accident” is surrounded by misuse and misconception from the beginning of workplace safety initiatives. This term was not used in my own system for defining levels or categories of events. Therefore, you might adopt your own definitions and tweak any standard of management systems as being used as a guide and not adopted verbatim if that fits your needs better.
Another good example surrounds negative connotations of definitions such as accidents. The word itself hints at the event not being foreseeable or preventable when in fact, it was and the true meaning was that the result was not intended. It also influences safety professionals to assume that events are never intentional and therefore they might miss early attempts, violations, or signs of workplace violence. In Human Performance applications to workplace safety, organizations are encouraged to look at what the organization is doing well, in order to set a standard and adopt best practices that actually are shown to be effective. Therefore, terms such as failure must be used rather than accident, to signify the negative connotation of risk. Successes or workstations and processes with little to no failure must also be examined in order to identify common elements that the organization is experiencing, in order to systematically adopt standards of design or practice.
Management standards like ISO 14001 and 18001 and ANSI Z-10 are designed around Deming’s Plan, Do, Check, and Act model. The diagram below shows the relation to Deming’s systems management model.
(Copied from Kausek, 2007)
PDCA provides a visual model for your management system design. The activities can be developed around meeting all of the PDCA activities shown above. Following this design allows for continuous improvement as it collects performance data and allows for management review of the data (Manuele, 2008).
All management systems should have at minimum planning components, operations, corrective action components, an improvement process, and support processes. Basically your system must continually identify workplace hazards and assess the risk. It must then deploy controls, assess or monitor countermeasures for effectiveness, tweak the countermeasures for maximum effectiveness, and then have support processes such as documentation and tracking methods. In other words it is a continuous investigations program. Identifying hazards, assessing the risk proactively or reactively are investigations. Examples include: JHA’s, audits, injury investigations, workstation assessment, behavior observations and many more are examples of investigations.
The Planning and Implementation of the System
This topic is a semester in itself and the information is being added to supplement your vision of the system and the steps to developing it and then implementing. The figure below shows the development flow that Kausek recommends for implementing OHSAS 18001 initiatives.
(Reprinted from: Kausek, 2007)
This chart shows steps in development and launch of a job hazard analysis initiative for a safety management system from planning, design, deployment, and improvement stages.
It may also be helpful to place or track project implementation on an Excel document that might resemble the example that Kausek provides in the figure below.
(Reprinted from Kausek,2007)
Change in an organization is difficult. The overall process can be listed as:
Identifying the drivers of change, Organize and plan the change, Evaluate the current situation, Develop the implementation project, Communicate the change to all levels, Implementation of the project, assess and improve the plan. The process is an ongoing circle of continual improvement that hinges on organizational learning.
Kotter covers the steps of organizational change in his book, “Leading Change.” Key to the success in the steps is use of key advocates, connecting change agents, and avoiding those that oppose change no matter what. His Steps for Organizational Change are:
Create a sense of urgency,
Form the guiding team,
Develop the vision and strategy,
Communicate for understanding and buy-in,
Empower others to act,
Produce short term wins,
Do not let up,
Create a new culture (Kotter, 1999).
The steps can be much more complex and are covered better in OSH 412. For instance, creating a sense of urgency relies on educating key members of the organization and being able in safety to produce break even points and show returns on investment in terms that show a true need and later produce buy-in.
Next in the course we will cover an overall management philosophy by studying Crosby’s Zero Defects and then using the core elements of Community Oriented Policing to give a foundation or vision and strategy for system design and implementation.
The second step of the course will be to develop a communications plan and a hazard recognition program. Metrics will then be covered that will measure performance for the organization. Then we will develop incident investigation forms, a failure modes and effects analysis form, and finally key components of an audit system.