7 Things you may be doing that are making EHS more difficult

Between jobsite hazards, budgetary pressures, and ever-changing Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations, a safety manager’s job is anything but easy. There are constant demands, tasks, and problems that need to be addressed. The workload and responsibilities are endless, and you must constantly keep up with various demands and challenges.

That said, there are certainly easier ways to do the job. A handful of best practices and helpful tools can make most safety-related tasks more manageable. To see which of these measures may benefit you, consider the following seven things you don’t want to do—practices that could be making environment, health, and safety (EHS) practices more difficult than they need to be.

1. Not sweating the small stuff

When we think about EHS, we typically think about accidents and traumatic injuries. However, a huge number of work-related health problems stem from longer-term musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). Fortunately, many of these disorders can be prevented with good ergonomics. Day-to-day aches and pains quickly add up to chronic neck and low-back problems, but they can be alleviated with good lifting practices, supportive equipment, and ample rest. Some of these measures may seem simplistic, but the time and money spent upfront on ergonomics will pay tremendous dividends in employee health and reduce injury costs.

2. Siloing your safety team

Your team may have the final say on new policies and procedures, but safety is a companywide concern. The best-thought-out policies won’t take effect if managers and workers don’t implement them, and implementation requires buy-in. That buy-in requires feedback and participation from stakeholders throughout your organization.

3. A focus on procedure over culture

Somewhat counterintuitively, too much of a focus on policies and procedures can come back to bite you. You might be able to tie specific policies to quantitative improvements, but at the end of the day, the overall goal is to improve working conditions, reduce incident rates, and cut incident-related costs.

To that end, your corporate culture is just as important as the nitty-gritty details of your plan.

• Do workers feel that safety personnel and executives have their best interests at heart?
• Do managers feel empowered to protect their teams?
• Can everyone rest assured there won’t be any negative repercussions to pointing out unsafe practices?

As soon as you can respond with a “yes” to these questions, compliance will become far less problematic.

4. Prioritizing the end result

We all want to achieve the coveted 0% incident rate, but focusing solely on an end goal has its downsides. Incident rates, healthcare costs, and other quantitative outcomes are influenced by a dizzying number of factors, many of which you can’t control.

Ultimately, a more productive (and probably less stressful) way to achieve your company’s safety goals is to focus on behaviors. There are probably a number of strategies you’ve found to be effective in improving safety, such as daily toolbox talks, walk-throughs, and detailed lockout/tagout logs. If you keep tabs on these events and make sure they improve in a measurable way, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll reach your goal.

5. Making it tough to find information

To workers focused on production, it can be tough to keep track of existing policies and procedures, much less new ones. A surefire way to contribute to the confusion is to make it difficult to locate safety-related information. From company manuals to detailed lockout/tagout procedures, everything an employee might need to know should be available in a central repository. Likewise, it shouldn’t be hard to find material safety data sheets (MSDSs) and other basic references.

6. A lack of positive reinforcement

Discipline for safety violations is essential in a company that operates with hazardous materials, heavy equipment, and dangerous jobsites. However, positive enforcement is just as important in encouraging compliance and fostering a safety-minded culture. People respond well to positive feedback, and if you take the time to reward safe behaviors, you might be surprised at how much easier your job becomes.

7. Manually managing safety data and reports

Between incident reports, internal audits, and the ever-growing list of OSHA-mandated documentation, safety personnel contend with a dizzying amount of paperwork. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try to manage all of these documents manually, particularly in our digital day and age.

Safety software can remove a tremendous burden on you and your team, allowing you to dedicate more time to meeting your workers’ needs. To learn how you can manage investigations, training, job safety analyses (JSAs), OSHA audits, and more—all with a single software package—contact BLR® for a free demonstration.