How can a business control high safety risk activities, and why should they?
Injuries and fatalities happen commonly in the workplace, around the world. All employers of people, to whom they provide compensation in exchange for a service (employees), have a duty to provide a safe working environment that is free from recognized and unprotected hazards that could ultimately be life-altering or life-threatening to employees. Employers in all businesses and industries cannot feasibly eliminate all safety risks from existing, rather, they can and must analyze the work and put in place controls to lower the likelihood or severity of an incident from producing harmful or fatal results. By conducting a thorough risk assessment employers can understand where risk exists. They can then use appropriate controls to manage to lower the likelihood and severity of a potentially life-altering or life-threatening outcome. In a best case scenario, employers will assess risk, implement and monitor controls to ensure their effectiveness, and make adjustments to the work process to ensure controls are adhered to by employees, enforced by management, and ultimately effective at contributing to a safe and healthy workplace. It is important to also establish the point that a safe working environment is both a social and a legal obligation for employers. Safe working environments limit not just the risk to employees but also to the business, one that reduces costs and increases employee retention.
First, to examine the need for a risk assessment and controls strategy let's first look at the basics from a social and legal responsibility perspective. Employers have an obligation to employees to provide a place of work that is both safe and healthy, even though the work may not be inherently safe to conduct-employers retain this responsibility because they control the workspace, issue the work tasks, and write the paychecks. It is not impossible to understand the point that exposing people to undue harm isn't acceptable. All humans have the ability to understand wrong from right, and intentionally harming a person would be the opposite of right. Similarly, it would also then be understandable that employers should not expose employees to undue harm that they recognize and may harm a person durinng the course and scope of their work. Though employees are assigned tasks and paid for their work, this doesn't make the assignment of a task, for which an employee is paid, reasonable for an employee to conduct without protection. Though not intentional in all cases, I believe it may be too common for employers to assign a task and not think about or plan for protecting against an unsafe outcome, simply, because employees are being paid to perform the task. In most cases I believe employers just do not know where the risk exists and what their responsibility is in protecting against it. In modern countries, the responsibility to create a safe and healthy working environment is commonly a legal obligation of employers.
In existence today are lawbooks thick with policies, standards, and procedures that live only because someone else did not. Regulations vary widely by country and location of the world, but all exist for the same reason-to prevent life-altering and life-ending consequences in the workplace-speed limits if you will. As they are written, some laws are not easy to follow and implement but they are necessary as a starting point for employers to interpret and apply to their work. A "risk assessment is a requirement in most legislation and safety standards" (Gunduz and Laitinen, 2018). On this last point, it is important that at least a small amount of time spent in assessing and controlling risk is required by all employers as laws and regulations relate to their industry. Companies large and small stand to gain value by evaluating risk. Companies who have smaller budgets or cannot often afford to employ a person or team to conduct this work can learn some key easy points and carrying out as risk assessment and implanting controls is not akin to having a large budget. Finally, critical to success in reducing fatalities and lost-time accidents, implementation should be a bedrock principle of all businesses. Without implementation of what you learn through evaluating risk, a desired outcome will not be achieved.
Besides being socially and legally obligated to provide a safe work environment, there are some specific business benefits, namely, the cost of injuries. "Cost" can be interpreted in financial terms, but also costs to the business from resulting occupational injuries and fatalities can be observed through loss of business reputation and overall business continuity. The reduction of work related fatalities, ultimately affects the "economic burden and human capital cost incurred by business" (Wrightson, 2012) and is a detractor to overall profitability. Also important, employee retention is jeopardized in an unsafe and unhealthy workplace. It is fact that humans can do more with all of their fingers and toes than they can without them. It is also true that, if given the choice, unhappy employees look for work at companies that care about their personal safety. Unsafe or unhealthy environments produce unhappy people, is disruptive to the business, and affects employee engagement in other business areas such as quality workmanship and positive customer experience. Risk assessments and safety controls that are conducted and implemented prior to employees engaging in work tasks is a prevention strategy that reduces business risk, improves operational efficiency and profitability, and increases employee retention. One final reason why risk assessment and controls implementation is so important-humans are going to get it wrong, it's our nature. It is not about "whether" humans will get it wrong, it's "when".
In order to reduce or eliminate safety or health risk, employers have to understand that it exists, where it exists, and to what degree. The process to determine these things is commonly referred to as risk assessment. As we've already established, businesses and industries that do not conduct risk assessments, will not see injuries on the horizon and will ultimately experience an increased incident frequency and severity rate. In some cases, legal requirements dictate that risk assessments be a standard of industry and that "risk assessment is a requirement in most legislation and safety standards" (Gunduz and Laitinen, 2018).
First, the business must evaluate the work and ask the question: "What's the worst possible thing that could happen?" Every task an employee conducts should be considered in the assessment and the process of an assignment. Tasks can vary from simple to complex with many opportunities for disaster in between. The tasks employers should be most concerned with are those that can produce the most severe results, namely death or permanent disability (loss of ability to move or use a body part in the same way it is supposed to work). For example, installing an underground water line must look at every sub-step task, from inspecting the digging equipment, to determining the type(s) of soil to be dug, the environmental conditions of the day on which the work will be done, the size and skill of the work crew, and so on. In each of these tasks related to the overall scope (installing a water line), the worst-case scenario must be reasonably observed and the most serious outcome contemplated. During the course of the work, workers could be crushed by moving or operating equipment, they could fall in the trench, a trench could collapse, and a number of other unhappy outcomes could be concluded. Factors that conclude a common likelihood of a serious incident taking place must be applied, considering the frequency at which a worker or work crew performs or undertakes this task-tasks can vary in their performed frequency, from very infrequent, or almost never, to those tasks performed often or continuously-this increases or decreases the actual or initial risk, respectively. The highest probable (possible) level of severity that could result from performing a work task incorrectly or without controls must be the considered, and is the basis for the development of controls that will work to prevent this most negative outcome. Life-altering incident outcomes are those that result in a loss of mobility or loss of ability to use a body part the way it was originally intended. Life-threatening incident outcomes are those that end in death.
From the risk assessment, we are able to see what conditions could create or contribute to a serious accident. We can also see the likelihood based on how frequently a worker is or potentially would be exposed. Controls must now be identified and inserted into a task or work sequence in order to reduce the likelihood of an incident (and that most negative outcome) from occurring, and overall reduce the severity of an incident outcome to less than a life-altering or life-threatening to personnel. The business must evaluate the work and ask the question: "What will we do to prevent that 'worst' thing from happening?".
Controls must be integrated into work tasks to be effective to reduce the likelihood of an injury or illness occurring, or reduce the severity of an injury or illness from being life-altering or life-threatening should an incident result. Common controls can be simply eliminating a risky step in the procedure or substituting dangerous steps and procedures for safer ones-these may reduce the likelihood of an incident occurring, or lower the severity of the probable outcome. There are a few established controls categories that actual actions fall into. The elimination of a high risk or high frequency task, either completely or within a sequence, is a control. Elimination is a preferred control because if you eliminate a high risk step, you remove the possibility of a serious accident altogether. Substitution of high risk or high frequency task for a safer one, is a control that reduces severity but probably will not reduce the likelihood of an incident occurrence. Engineering controls are an established category of controls to reduce likelihood but not reduce severity should an incident take place. Administrative controls cannot often be easily enforced but can be effective when coupled or partnered with other controls. Written polices and procedures are examples of administrative controls. Last, safety protective equipment can be worn or used to reduce the severity of an accident outcome but has little to no effect to lower the likelihood of an incident occurrence. PPE simply should be a last resort but may be a critical control. Critical controls are important to mention. In looking at factors leading to an incident, there are often many factors or breakdowns that lead up to an accident taking place, but there is one factor that should it cease to exist an accident will certainly result. The straw that broke the camel's back, or the last Jenga block pulled before the tower falls, so to speak. A "critical control" prevents that last straw from coming down on the camel's back or that last Jenga block from being pulled.
It would be simple to conduct a thorough risk assessment, and identify and implement controls, and leave it at that. Having this process in place is a good first step but will not work to make a business or work process safe to protect workers over the long term-the process needs to be monitored and improved. Even the most consistent organizations change over time, in the way they work and who conducts the work-the who, what, where, when and how always changes. For these reasons, it's important to reevaluate changing business needs and also reevaluate risks and controls to improve them when conditions and needs change. The business must look at the controls it implements and then ask the question: "Is what we're doing enough?"
Goals must be set in order to have a bar to then measure success against-accidents that are not happening or are producing minor negative results, on their own, aren't an indicator of a successful controls implementation or that controls in place are sufficient the way they exist. Careful collection and use of data collected from observing the work, can help to understand whether controls are being implemented in practice by workers, and are enforced by management. In large organizations, it may be simpler to see unsuccessful controls implementation through rising medical insurance and costs incurred by the business. Incidence rates recordable and reportable to regulatory agencies can be significant in understanding that a problem exist and reevaluation is necessary. Implementing an audit program and requiring a periodic review of whether or not policies and procedures are being followed is another strong process to understand effectiveness of controls implementation; conducting a survey of employees to gage the program's effectiveness is another. Performing a detailed analysis of work related accidents and injuries is important for several reasons, but namely, to provide information for the business to then evaluate the effectiveness of its controls-in the case of a fatality, the controls obviously did not work as planned, produced an undesired result and therefore must be reevaluated. Making risk assessment a routine process that is integrated in the design, planning and completion of the work is best. Having a system in place that monitors for overall effectiveness and provides opportunity for improving the process helps close the loop.
To review, the reduction of work related injuries and fatalities is one responsibility and legal obligation of employers that starts by understanding how each task an employee conducts could seriously injure or kill the employee. There are business benefits to the process of risk assessment and controls implementation. The process of identifying, selecting and implementing controls that work to mitigate an undesired outcome or eliminate the likelihood altogether is referred to risk assessment. The process formalizes by monitoring the execution of the controls implementation by employees, and by monitoring the actual outcomes of negative events that do happen. Employers can further improve the process by making enhancements to their controls packages when controls clearly aren't sufficient.
Works Cited
Wrightson, Keith. "The Price of Inaction."
Gunduz, Murat, and Heikki Laitinen. "Construction Safety Risk Assessment with Introduced Control Levels." Journal of Civil Engineering and Management
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Chokor, Abbas, et al. "Analyzing Arizona OSHA Injury Reports Using Unsupervised Machine Learning." Procedia Engineering
Alsamadani, Rayyan, et al. "Measuring and Modelling Safety Communication in Small Work Crews in the US Using Social Network Analysis." Construction Management and Economics
"UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR." Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Hasle, Peter, and Hans Jørgen Limborg. "A Review of the Literature on Preventive Occupational Health and Safety Activities in Small Enterprises." Industrial Health
