Safety and Health Training Plan and Employee Safety and Health Suggestion System
Part I
Introductory Section
Safety management systems (SMS) are instituted so that a workplace maintains a high level of safety, preventing accidents and injuries by training beforehand in ways to avoid them. Every employee of an organization should be involved in an SMS including management employees. There should be regular training and monitoring. An SMS is a comprehensive method of avoiding accidents and injuries, and maintaining a safe work environment.
Management Commitment
With a safety management system (SMS), the main objective is to have every employee involved from the CEO down to the part-time window washer. Employees can be resources of safety management if the management team involves them and makes them feel as if they are integral to the success of the SMS. Some employees have frontline experience that is useful in an SMS. However, they probably will not be enthusiastic about it unless the organization mandates and encourages active employee involvement. The most powerful motivation is accident prevention (Columbia Southern University, p. 2). Management must provide education and training, and encourage and motivate employees to become involved in their own safety and the safety of others in the workplace.
Training and Accountability
Training and accountability are important in any SMS. Through training, employees become aware of what causes accidents and how they can be prevented. It also reveals the causes of accidents and injuries and lets employees understand their responsibility in preventing them. “Safety training is of vital importance to both management and the workforce as it forms an important safety knowledge base on which to build a comprehensive safety management system” (McKinnon, 2017, p. 113). Safety training should be ongoing and all employees should be held accountable for safety in the workplace.
Types of Training
Several types of safety training exist but three main types are induction or orientation training, refresher training and other specific types such as CPR or first aid training. Induction or orientation training is for new employees so that they become familiar with the workplace, its risks and its safety policies. Refresher training is follow up training that occurs on a regular basis such as yearly. However, safety training should take place more often than once per year. That means there are specific areas related to safety in which employees can be trained such as CPR or first aid that fits nicely into an SMS. Other types of specific safety training areas include risk management, ergonomics and hazard identification (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 114-115).
Monitoring the Training Program
One way to monitor the success of an SMS is to carry out planned job observations. Job Safe Practices (JSPs) are protocols for each position held by employees at a jobsite and should be made available to all employees. Employees should be trained in JSPs and should be supervised until they can follow the procedure without leaving any of the steps out of the procedure. Planned job observations can be scheduled on a regular basis to ensure that employees are following JSPs. Planned job observations can also be impromptu, and can be considered part of the SMS (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 120-121). Another type of SMS monitoring is safety inspections. These are mainly to find unsafe conditions and to correct them. They should be carried out on a regular basis also.
Evaluating the Safety and Health Training Program
Evaluation of an SMS takes place through audits. SMS audits are done to ensure that all parts of the SMS are being carried out. They can be formal internal audits or they can be informal, impromptu audits. Audits can also be carried out by a third party outside the organization such as OSHA or a contracted auditing company. All aspects of the SMS are considered during audits (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 123-124).
Part II
Type of Information to Collect
All employees should be encouraged to report workplace situations that are approaching or becoming hazards such as slippery conditions in winter weather, health concerns such as mold in the break room, and SMS program shortcomings such as an area of the workplace that does not get scrutiny such as employee restrooms or breakrooms. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) (2016) explains that workers are the best people to report such things because they may see situations about which management is unaware (OSHA, 2016). Other types of information that should be reported include unsafe conditions, close calls, near misses, and actual incidents.
Types of information that should be included on a suggestion form are the time, date, and location of an incident, who is involved in the incident, and the type of incident such as whether it is a potential hazard, a health hazard or an unreported accident. Forms should be collected on a regular basis such as weekly. Daily may be too frequent unless the organization is very large, but weekly seems like a reasonable interval so that the information is still recent.
Other ways to generate safety suggestions besides installing a suggestion box also exist. For instance, according to Heathfield (2019) of The Balance Careers, each department can have regularly scheduled brainstorming sessions about how to improve safety and health in the workplace. Ideas can also be brought up during weekly staff meetings. The organization can schedule monthly lunch meetings where each employee must submit one idea to improve the organization’s safety and health standard, and managers can bring employee ideas to managers’ meetings (Heathfield, 2019). Suggestion boxes are good, but not all employees feel inclined to participate on that level. These other suggestions may benefit an organization too.
Responsibility for Following Up on Suggestion Forms
The SMS manager should be responsible for collecting and reviewing safety suggestions or reports. However, a team should be established to review the safety suggestions too. This team should be made up of employees from each department and at all levels of the organization. If it consists of only managers, then it will appear that it is out of touch or trying to prevent the suggestions being carried out, so it must be inclusive of all department and all types of employees (Heathfield, 2019). One reason to include all types of employees is so that perspectives that managers may not see can be included in the SMS. For instance, an employee from the accounting department knows how much the last accident or injury cost the company in employee time lost, insurance costs, and potential fines.
Some things to keep in mind about a safety suggestion review team are the frequency of the meetings. If they are too frequent, they become too much of a burden on employees’ time. If they are not frequent enough, incidents pass and are not addressed. Members of the safety suggestion review team should be rotated on a regular basis too (Heathfield, 2019). Beyond that, the team must be given authority to implement the suggestions.
Decisions and Timelines Regarding Safety Suggestions
The SMS should already have a safety team in place. It is they who should make the decisions about which suggestions to follow or follow up. In other words, some suggestions may not be feasible or relative. Others may be excellent suggestions but need management or director approval. Those may take some time to implement and may be rejected by those who ultimately have the responsibility and authority for implementing change in the workplace. The type of suggestion and the elements involved in it will determine the amount of time that implementing suggestions will take.
References
Columbia Southern University. (n.d.). Unit 4 Study Guide: Fostering Employee Involvement and Training. 1-5. Columbia Southern University.
Heathfield, S. M. (2019, August 17). Harness the Power of an Employee Suggestion Program. Retrieved from The Balance Careers: https://www.thebalancecareers....
McKinnon, R. C. (2017). Risk-based, Management-led, Audit-driven, Safety Management Systems. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor and Francis.
OSHA. (2016, October). Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs. Retrieved from Occupational Safety and Health Administration: https://www.osha.gov/shpguidel...
