About Dan McLean

Dan McLean is a senior content marketing manager for Intelex Technologies in Toronto, specializing in environment, health and safety (EHS) topics. He has been a journalist, market researcher, executive communications specialist and content marketer over his 30-plus year career in information technology.

OSHA Recordkeeping: An Overview of the Rules

Injury and illness data collected and reported by employers must be uniform and accurate, assuring statistical data consistency and validity.

Many employers in the United States are obliged to document workplace injuries and illnesses under OSHA’s Recordkeeping Rule. While this document doesn’t need to be submitted to OSHA unless requested, organizations and businesses subject to the recordkeeping rule must produce these documents when requested make them available during inspections. Incident reports and logs of on-site recordable incidents must be maintained for a period of at least five years.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act) directs employers who are subject to the rule to annually prepare and maintain a record of occupational injuries and illnesses. This must be reported each year by March 2. Generally, organizations that employ 10 or fewer people during the previous calendar year do not need to report, unless otherwise directed … Read more...

What You Need to Know: The Four Key Steps When Performing a Job Safety Analysis (JSA)

In a job safety analysis, each basic step of a job is determined, potential hazards are identified in each step, and recommendations are made for the safest way to perform it. 
In a job safety analysis, each basic step of a job is determined, potential hazards are identified in each step and recommendations are made for the safest way to perform it. 

A job safety analysis (JSA) or job hazard analysis (JHA) are generally interchangeable terms used to describe plans that define and outline how to control hazards associated with certain processes, jobs, or procedures.

JSAs incorporate health and safety principles and practices into a task or job. When creating a JSA, or using Job Safety Analysis software, it’s important not to define a job too broadly or narrowly. In a JSA, each basic step of a job is determined, potential hazards are identified in each step, and recommendations are made for the safest way to perform it. 

Recognizing hazards is a matter of watching a worker actually do a job.  The analysis that follows should seek … Read more...

EHS Software Solves a Need for Speed for This Construction Company

Moss searched for a safety management system and settled on the Intelex Health and Safety Management platform to organize all the data it had been collecting.
Moss went searching for a health and safety management system and settled on the Intelex Health and Safety Management platform to bring all its data from various processes into a centralized database, including incident reporting, inspections, behavioral-based observations, recorded near misses, good catches and even safety suggestions.

Fast growing companies often find themselves needing a high-performance approach to environmental health and safety (EHS).

Take the case of Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based construction company Moss & Associates, whose vice president of environmental health and safety, Scott Gerard, recently told the story of his company’s business growth. During a presentation at the 2021 EHS Today Safety Leadership Conference, Gerard said Moss started out as a company of 300 people some 17 years ago and has today become an organization of more than 3,000 employees with expectations to reach 6,000 this year.

But high growth often moves too quickly past other corporate capabilities. In … Read more...

Incident Management: Is Your OSHA Recordkeeping Capturing Every Recordable Incident?

Goals and key performance indicators hinging on the number of incidents, recordables, days away and other factors are usually put in place to help drive a focus to safety, but the good intention can lead to unintended and undesired consequences, such as underreporting of injuries.

Employers in private industry reported 2.7 million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses to the U.S. Department of Labor in 2020 as part of OSHA recordkeeping reporting. That’s a lot of paperwork.

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard Part 1904, many employers with more than 10 employees are required to record and report any work-related fatalities, injuries and illnesses of their covered employees using OSHA Recordkeeping Forms 300, 300A and 301. (Certain low-risk industries are exempted, and minor injuries requiring first aid only do not need to be recorded.)

A 2018 report submitted to the United States Congress by the Office … Read more...

Artificial Intelligence Stakes its Claim in EHS Management

ehsAI’s cloud-based platform applies NLP algorithms to interpret and extract EHS requirements from regulatory documents.
ehsAI’s cloud-based platform applies NLP algorithms to interpret and extract EHS requirements from regulatory documents. This output can be exported into EHS software systems such as Intelex EHS Management Software to manage requirements and tasks and ensure timely execution.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology, in the context of EHS management, seems a perfect fit in an essential area: the need to wade through a morass of complex and ever-changing regulations, compliance, permits, consent decrees and other critical EHS documents. It’s a human-intensive and often error-prone task that, if done improperly, risks fines and other penalties for failure to comply.

Document deconstruction – to identify the actions that EHS professionals are required to take – is difficult, time-consuming, complicated and expensive because of the manual grunt-work need from many people to pore through and analyze EHS documents. 

Vancouver, Canada-based ehsAI has developed an AI technology based on machine learning and natural … Read more...

Visual Literacy Helps Safety Professionals See the Bigger Picture

Visual lessons grounded in art education – visual literacy – can make a difference in how much you see, which can be a lifesaver in hazardous work situations.
Visual literacy is a new term that’s being applied to safety and hazardous situations at work. If workers see what they might otherwise miss, they’re apt to take action and improve their own personal safety as well as the safety of others.

The visual lessons grounded in art education – known as visual literacy – can make a difference in how much you see and how to interpret the meaning of it. This idea holds intriguing potential for safety hazard identification, where it’s easy to miss important details in all-too-familiar workplace surroundings.

“Typically, it takes an incident to inform us that a hazard exists. While it’s really important that when we have an incident, we identify and fix it, it’s also a lousy way to run a safety program if that’s all you’re focused on,” says Doug Pontsler, the chairman and managing director of the Center of Visual Expertise or … Read more...

What Is Risk Management? Causal Factors and Risk Assessment are Keys to Unlocking Job Hazard Insights

Rather than reacting to existing events, implement risk management software to anticipate potential hazards and implement risk management and assessment strategies.

What can be done today to prevent worker injuries and deaths tomorrow? The answer lies in the notion of predictive analytics discovered through the use of risk management software that use historical data to identify the workplace danger waiting to strike.

Rather than reacting or responding to what’s already happened, EHS leaders should be looking to anticipate and forecast potential hazards and implement necessary change and prevention strategies before an employee is harmed.

Predicting negative events or incidents that might happen in a workplace is a matter of identifying “causal factors” through data analysis, but these clues are often not apparent and likely to be hidden in variables not captured in incident reports.

A causal factor can be defined as any major unplanned or unintended contributor to an incident that if eliminated would prevent or reduce the severity or frequency of the incident. Identifying causal factors requires digging deeper into … Read more...

How to Survive an OSHA Inspection: Part 2

If OSHA comes knocking, be co-operative and responsive when the OSHA inspector arrives, but  maintaini control of the onsite safety inspection if possible.
If OSHA comes knocking, be co-operative and responsive when the OSHA inspector arrives, but maintain control of the onsite safety inspection if possible.

(Part 2 of this two-part blog post series explains what to expect during an OSHA on-site inspection, the rights a company has during an inspection and how to impose a level of control over how an inspection proceeds. Check out Part 1 to learn about the expected focus on OSHA onsite inspections in 2022 and how to prepare.)

Many companies aren’t prepared for a surprise examination of their workplace facilities so it’s essential to think ahead and establish parameters for inspection if and when Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors come to call.

Kirsten White, a partner with Atlanta-based legal firm Fisher Phillips LLC, recommends being co-operative and responsive when an OSHA inspector arrives, but to also focus on maintaining control of the onsite safety … Read more...

How to Survive an OSHA Inspection: Part 1

Expect much more investigation activity from OSHA in 2022, including OSHA enforcement, larger fines and shaming press releases.
Big changes are in store for companies that are facing OSHA inspections. Be prepared before an OSHA inspector arrives by creating an action plan that assigns inspection-related activities and provides a checklist of things to consider.

(This is Part 1 of a two-blog series explaining an expected course of OSHA inspections in 2022, the burden of proof required prior to an inspection, how to handle an informal complaint and what to do when an OSHA inspection happens. Part 2 will explore how to take control and manage an inspection.)

Expect much more investigation activity from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 2022 as the agency looks to increase its inspections and is emboldened by a federal government more favorable to enforcement.

Edwin Foulke, a partner with Atlanta-based law firm Fisher Phillips LLC, says he believes President Joe Biden’s administration will direct OSHA enforcement to reduce … Read more...

It’s Time to End the Blame Game and Start a Just Safety Culture

It's time for companies to build a just safety culture, where trust in workers is established, people feel safe to communicate their concerns and observations.
It’s time for companies to build a just safety culture, where trust in workers is established, people feel safe to communicate their concerns and observations and are apt do the right things regardless of who is watching.

It’s often said that accidents will happen, but in many workplaces there’s a tendency to blame someone for the mishap. It’s the kind of thinking that harms efforts to keep workers safe.

So says health and safety professional Rod Courtney who shared his views on how to create a “just” safety culture during a keynote speech at the recent EHS Today Safety Leadership Conference. Human errors in the workplace are normal and even the best people make mistakes on the job.

“Blaming those who make mistakes fixes nothing. We need to stop blaming people,” Courtney says. “It’s human nature to find fault. It’s human nature to find out who did it, someone … Read more...