Tag Archives: Health and Safety

L2L: How Do You Get Executives on Board with Health & Safety Initiatives?

Posted on by
Reply
Engaging leaders in EHS is key to changing workplace culture.

Safety leaders from five companies met in the UK as part of our new Leaders2Leaders programme, a new series of videos, content and resources for health and safety professionals. They discussed a number of topics, including the impact of technology on health and safety, regulatory compliance, barriers to visibility, maintaining a safety culture, dialogue and buy-in with executives, bridging organisational siloes and what health and safety professionals should focus on as a matter of priority. While these topics all are interconnected, the experts had a lot to say about each one.

Episode 4 of the Leaders2Leaders video series focuses on how to better engage key executives from across your organisation. How and what you communicate with executives should be predicated upon their role in the company.

Messaging Counts with Executives

In this episode, Paul Darby, Global Head of Health & … Read more...

Engaging your Employees: Four Strategies for Success

Posted on by
Reply

How do you help employees feel accountable in their jobs? How do you create and cultivate a workplace filled with engaged employees? This potentially is the Holy Grail for many organizations, regardless of industry.

Graphic of a group of frontline workers including healthcare workers, policemen, construction workers, firemen, factory workers, etc

Deep and deliberate employee engagement can result in a more focused workforce where the right thing is done even when no one is looking. It’s not hard to imagine how this can translate into a quantifiable ROI for your organization. The key to achieving this level of engagement is motivation.

Motivation is necessary for survival in the most basic sense of the word. We need to be motivated to get out of bed, feed ourselves, shower, go to the doctor, clean the house, celebrate birthdays and all the other seemingly mundane tasks that create meaning in the context of private and public interactions and cultural contracts. This motivation becomes important in the workplace when health, safety, … Read more...

Passing the Test: How Good Is your Safety Management System?

Posted on by
1

I talk a lot about management systems and why a good one is imperative to sustainable business success.

A management system, simply put, is the playbook in how an organization manages its moving parts to achieve its goals. The level of simplicity or even the complexity of such a system is entirely dependent on things like organization size, the business functions needing control, the business sector and even legal obligations, just to name a few.

Graphic of a woman looking at safety management software on tablet

Specific to safety, a Safety Management System (SMS) is a systematic approach to ensuring safety. What it is not is a set of rules based on regulatory standards such as OSHA or the HSE. The SMS is a collection of management elements that are identified and evaluated to develop and execute plans to gain and sustain control within a process framework. While organizations will decide what features the Safety Management System needs to control, the … Read more...

Suspended Loads and Respecting the Fall Zone

Posted on by
1

In almost every industry, a load of some kind is being lifted, manipulated, lowered or carried in a way that poses risk to workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are more than 50,000 “struck by falling object” recordable injuries every year in the United States. That’s one injury every 10 minutes caused by a dropped object in the workplace.

Graphic of a frontline worker falling in the workplace

 

Understanding the Fall Zone

The fall zone as defined by OSHA is “the area including, but not limited to, the area directly beneath the load in which it is reasonably foreseeable that partially or completely suspended materials could fall in the event of an accident.” OSHA goes on to state that standing under a suspended load is prohibited and that “while the operator is not moving a suspended load, no employee must be within the fall zone, except for employees (who are): engaged in hooking, unhooking or … Read more...

Keeping Workers Safe Is the Golden Rule for This Canadian Mining Company

Posted on by
Reply

A rooted culture of caring runs deep within Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. – a Canadian-based gold producer with operations in Canada, Finland and Mexico.

Louise Grondin, Agnico Eagle’s senior Vice-President of Environment, Sustainable Development and People, says worker safety is paramount and her company wants every employee to be responsible for their own and others’ safety. To that end, it’s important for everyone to play a part in the effort to declare all events and situations that may put workers at risk. The goal is to eliminate any potential harm.

A graphic of a series of frontline workers working at a gold mine

“It’s not a game to … Read more...

How to Handle Permits to Work the Modern, Efficient Way

Posted on by
Reply

Most employers are legally required to post some form of Permit to Work – whether it is a construction site, hospital, manufacturing plant or even a brewery. A Permit to Work:

  • makes workers, supervisors and management aware of any hazards around them,
  • educates them on how to safely work with the hazards, and
  • in many cases, lays out an action plan to ensure everyone works safely with each other.

Graphic of a document being stamped

Employers must post a printed Permit to Work in a visible space for workers to see when they enter the work site. They must also inform workers entering the work site for the first time of any open permits. Workers must confirm, through a signature, that they acknowledge and are aware of the information provided to them. While this task sounds simple, companies with large worksites must often manage hundreds of workers coming on and off a site with multiple Permits … Read more...

Why it’s critical to get Lockout/Tagout right

Posted on by
Reply

The Lockout/Tagout (Control of Hazardous Energy) standard is one of the most frequently cited standards of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA). For this reason and many others, says Eric Conn, Chair, OSHA/Workplace Safety Practice Group at Conn Maciel Carey LLP, companies should make compliance with the standard an area of focus. The firm, which specializes in OSHA-related matters, sees Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) consistently appearing in the top five on OSHA’s list of most frequently-cited standards.

A lockout/tagout on a pipe

“OSHA is paying a lot of attention to it,” Conn said during a recent webinar devoted to the topic.

“It’s known as the low-hanging fruit. When OSHA is in your facility, no matter what it is that caused them to be there, [LOTO] is something they can find and cite rather easily, and they do.”

The LOTO standard is designed to protect workers from hazardous energy and moving mechanical parts while they are … Read more...

Transforming Health & Safety

Posted on by
Reply

Saving safetyWhat got us to where we are today will not get us to where we want to be tomorrow.

Decades of awareness building, training, and record keeping on Occupational Health and Safety – spearheaded by private and public enterprises and prodded along by governments – have got us to where we are today. These efforts have moved us incrementally along a path over the past four decades from literally dozens of deaths per day in the US alone, to a quarter of this number today.

However, the new standard many companies are striving for of zero fatalities and zero serious injuries requires a breakthrough. Traditional health and safety investments relying on moral suasion and larger budgets suffer from diminished returns after a certain point. To drastically change safety outcomes, we need to look beyond traditional Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) approaches. New social and mobile technology offer hope of getting … Read more...

5 Reasons Why SaaS is Changing EHS Software

Posted on by
2


What is SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is transforming how organizations of all shapes and sizes are deploying and using software (including EHS software). The IT research firm, Gartner defines SaaS as “software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers software based on one set of common code and data definitions that is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers at any time on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.”

In effect, SaaS is similar to leased software maintained and hosted by the vendor that created it.

Why SaaS?

There are a number of attributes that make purchasing software in a SaaS model much more advantageous that traditional owned and on-premises enterprise software.  Here are 5 of the most important:

1. Lower cost of entry

One of the most important attributes of SaaS … Read more...

Materiality Assessments in 4 Simple Steps

Posted on by
2

What is it?

Materiality. It’s a concept that comes up more and more frequently – especially when it comes to discussions of sustainability. But what is it exactly and how and why is it applicable to EHS?

Put simply. Materiality is a principle to help define and determine the business, social and environmental topics that matter most to a business and its stakeholders. This is also something that 80% of the world’s largest 250 companies are already tracking and reporting on as part of their sustainability reporting efforts.

Like many topics this is in part due to increased focus on corporate social responsibility as a differentiator for these businesses, and in part due to regulations and standards. Of these standards, the main one is the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) G4 guidelines. In Europe there is currently the added pressure of the European Directive on non-financial reporting for publicly traded companies … Read more...