Hazard identification and mitigation help keep your employees safe. Workplaces with the strongest safety cultures make hazard identification and mitigation a priority by regularly and actively managing the risk in their work environments. Here are five things you can easily do to improve your safety culture in this area:
- Conduct hazard assessments, also called inspections, of your worksites regularly and often.
- How often you inspect your workplace depends on the risk involved. This includes the job involved, what the hazard is, the proficiency of employees, changes in equipment or work processes, and the history of work-place injuries and illnesses. Remember, the more you identify and mitigate hazards, the safer your employees will be.
- Get your employees involved.
- Don’t rely on just management to conduct your inspections. Train all of your employees to conduct inspections of your work environment. This will help to increase their hazard awareness on a day-to-day basis.
- Do the same with mitigating hazards. No one knows the hazards of your work environment and how to control those hazards better than your employees.
- Ask your employees to offer suggestions on how to mitigate the hazards you or they identify.
- Audit how your employees perform the job.
- Do your employees perform the job they way they were trained? If not, find out why. There may be a hazard that they are struggling with that prevents them from doing so, or maybe they just came up with a more effective and safer way of doing the job.
- Conduct a Job Hazard Analysis (JHA).
- A JHA helps you identify hazards associated with specific tasks. You can then develop and implement control measures to reduce or eliminate those hazards.
- Train your employees to mitigate hazards using the Hierarchy of Controls.
- The Hierarchy of Controls is the preferred method of mitigating hazards in the workplace. Training your employees on this technique of controlling hazards will help ensure that you find the appropriate control for each identified hazard.
