Occupational Health and Safety Management - Assignment Example

Occupational Health and Safety Management Most companies in today’s market place regard occupational health and safety as an integral part of doing business. It is considered the management’s commitment and responsibility to provide a safe and healthy workplace for its employees. Occupational injuries that occur at the workplace are considered to be failings within the management system, thereby setting standards for the management to abide. The first step to undertake is to set up a Safety and Health Policy which expresses the position of the company in relation to safety and health. The Safety and Health Policy statement should set forth the purpose and philosophy of the company, delineate the program’s goal and assign responsibility for all company personnel (Reese, 2003). Once the policy is set, responsibility to implement and supervise the same should be assigned to an individual. This in no way should relieve management from its commitment or the supervisors and employees from their responsibilities to enforce and adhere to the company’s health and safety requirements. Discipline is an integral part of implementing safety measures in a company. Employees should be strictly overseen as complying with these measures and failure of this will result in failure of the entire health and safety effort. Some companies take a further step in their discipline policy resulting in time off without pay for limited days followed by dismissal on the next offense (Reese, 2003). The first line supervisor is effectively the key to good occupational safety and health efforts. The supervisors should be held responsible for their safety performance as well as the performance of their crews. Figure 1: Implementing Safety and Health as part of the organizational culture One of the most effective methods of implementing safety measures is through motivation to work in a safe manner. Data indicate that 85 to 90 percent of accident causes are likely the result of unsafe behavior. The aim should be to provide an environment where employers are induced to motivate themselves as well as their employees. Delegating more responsibilities to employees boost morale, inspiration to account one’s own behavior at the workplace, peer pressure, incentives and rewards when least expected, etc. are some methods of motivation (Reese, 2003). The Occupational Safety and Health Act have brought a restructuring of programs and activities relating to safeguarding the health of the worker. OSHA requires employers to protect their employees from workplace hazards such as machines, procedures at the workplace and harmful substances. Companies encourage employees themselves to come up with suggestions in preventing hazards. There are four principle approaches to hazard prevention: psychological, enforcement, engineering and analytical. These include implementing predetermined safe work practices, awareness devices, and administrative controls and so on. Workplace audits should be conducted so as to determine the safety and health condition of the workplace, to comply by OSHA rules, evaluate supervisor’s and worker’s safety performance and evaluate progress regarding safety and health issues and problems (Reese, 2003). Keith Bardney has been in the health and safety business for over 23 years. From food industry to the worker’s compensation insurance industry, he has covered several areas of specialization including quality control, research and development, production supervision and human resource management. Today, he is the Senior Manager of Operational Risk Management for Heinz North America. Aside from a Bachelor’s Degree in Occupational Safety from Illinois State University, Master’s in OSH/ Environmental Management from Columbia Southern University and a CSP (Certified Safety Professional); he also has several safety seminars to his credit. These include seminars attended while working as the loss control professional providing prevention services to the National Safety Council as well as training undergone for the effective completion of his ASP and finally, the CSP. He has written a safety article on pressure wheels in the past and continues to update education units to maintain his CSP certification. In the initial years as a safety professional, Keith Bardney learned to understand safety as a continuous improvement system. He was deeply influenced by his supervisor from the first safety job he undertook, who taught him the basics of setting performance standards and then measuring against those standards in order to eliminate/ reduce workplace exposures. Keith joined Heinz in 1999 as the Manager for EHS in Stockton, CA. Over the years, he has held positions of increasing responsibility including Human Resource Manager and Regional Safety Manager before stepping into to the corporate arena. Over time, Keith has earned his place in the business through guaranteed safety results using a proven safety system and involving employees in the safety process to assist with identifying risk areas and implementing safety solutions. As the Senior Manager of Operational Risk Management, Keith is involved in training employees in health and safety measures. He conducts Management/ Employee Safety Training programs and acts as the resource to factories for directions involved in safety and health. He also conducts audits and assessments of the factories to ensure that they meet the performance standards set by the company. His role also covers assisting with analysis of sources to help in eliminating existing hazards. According to him, the role of health and safety has evolved over time, from placing individuals who could not make it in operations back in the early eighties to refined safety professionals who manage safety systems. The profession itself was considered as a non-value adding job. The job entailed investigating into accidents and focused on lagging indicators alone. Today the job has evolved into prevention of hazards and the professionals are facilitators, capable of giving companies a competitive advantage through compensation cost reductions and focus on leading indicators like employee involvement, goal setting, action planning, ergonomics, safety training systems and so on. Safety and health managers at Heinz address all four principal approaches towards preventing work hazards as part of the Heinz Safety Process. In the words of Keith Bardney, “every successful safety professional should possess three characteristics and they are vision, belief and drive.” Believing that one can achieve a task is the first step to actually achieving it. Awards are another form of psychological motivation and are recommended to be used as the icing on the cake. A solid process should be in place before attempting to use awards as a motivation for implementing safety measures. Every factory within the Heinz organization sets aggressive goals every year called the Safety & Health Accident Reduction Plan (SHARP). It is a continuous improvement process that focuses proactively on reducing exposures from audits and potential opportunities. The goal is set to reducing hazards by an average of 30% every year and eliminating unsafe conditions and near misses. Heinz Safety Process measures line management safety activities and results as their annual reviews and bonuses cover 20% of their annual pay. They set performance standards like expectations, planning, ergonomics, training and observations for the management to follow. Top management understands numbers and look for return on investments as the language of communication. This is done by quantifying the work process, starting from a specific department of a factory and showing the implementation and the favorable results that follow and finally linking them to direct worker’s compensation costs and indirect costs of conducting investigations and loss of production due to injuries. As the senior operations manager at Heinz, Keith’s role involves supporting five ORM elements within the organization. 1) Business Continuity Management – Heinz completed BCM plans using an umbrella concept to include all crisis management phases for predetermined scenarios. Currently Heinz is focusing on strategies to address the Supply Chain Business Unit as well. 2) Environmental Management – Heinz factories implemented aggressive utility reduction goals and, conducted an audit process and identified the risks to introduce control measures, resulting in decrease in company costs from environmental penalties. The company is now striving ahead, with focus on completing audits o at all its facilities to ensure effective compliance. 3) Safety and Health Management – Heinz introduced SHARP, developed scorecards, consistent monthly reports and elevated credentials for safety professionals. In the current year the company has introduced seven continuous improvement projects o their goals, communicated to employees through visual boards, utilized factory assessment tools, benchmarked against peer Industry Groups and, trained safety employees via green belt/black belt. 4) Food Security and Defense Management – This element is to protect employees, products and consumers and reduce the risk of workplace violence. Heinz implemented vulnerability assessments and commitment based security training for all factories except three and strives to complete this process in the current year. 5) Asset Conservation Management – This is a function of an organization to protect and preserve properties owned by that organization. Heinz focused on closing all Human and Physical Elements less than 10k identified during Ace Insurance Inspections. Asset Conservation location Representatives were identified for all locations and action plans were developed for every location. To conclude, the safety manager of an organization should act as the facilitator and equip the supervisors and lower level employees with proper tools to implement the safety measures. The supervisors are the key to a successful safety process. They have direct span of control of employees and hence are responsible for setting an example and proper standards to comply with. They can do this by participating in safety audits, meetings, safety committees, etc. Heinz identifies drugs and alcohol abuse in the workplace as a legitimate problem and works towards preventing the same. It is the duty of the safety manager to assume the responsibility of preventing and eliminating such abuse and protecting the interests of all employees in the workplace. In the words of Keith Bardney, “in today’s workplace the Human Resource Function, Safety Function and Environmental Function overlap”. Keith Bardney is goal oriented and set in his safety arena. His goal is to help send as many people home safely as possible and help produce the highest quality products efficiently and accident free. He started his career climb in Stockton, CA responsible for 300 employees, then started handling 5 factories containing 2000 employees and today stands responsible for 10,000 employees. The job at Heinz has been immensely rewarding for Keith. Heinz has reduced its OSHA Incident Rate (OIR) from 17.8 to 1.65 and has managed to save over 70 million dollars in the last 17 years. Safety has definitely helped with efficiency and quality within the organization and that has been a reward in itself. References Reese, Charles. D. (2003). Occupational Health and Safety Management: A Practical Approach. CRC Press US Department of Labor: Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Retrieved on 30 November, 2007. [http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/safetyhealth/index.html] Read More