Building a successful plant or company safety process

By Frank E. Cordier, OHSA Advisory Board for Sawmills

ATLANTA, May 12, 2008 - I am the retired director of Safety & Health of a major industry company and I currently serving on the OHSA Advisory Board for Sawmills. In this capacity, I would like to overview my opinions on what makes the most effective safety process. I will touch on some of the priority issues in much more detail in later issues. As I alluded to earlier, I will focus on any new or “hot” issues that come up with OSHA enforcement, injury trends or procedural questions. To start with what I have observed or learned, I will offer up a couple of the major points of contention in how we should manage safety. These are just touching the surface and we will explain many more in following issues.

• Is line management (starting with employees and supervisors), or corporate responsible for safety?

Corporate safety establishes the goals and sets the direction, but line supervision owns, and is responsible for its own safety process. Care must be taken however to ensure that there is enough overview to keep all regulatory requirements addressed, complied and abated with the same approach. Additional help can be recruited for specific assignments and extra help can assist in implementation. Safety professionals are often used for a resource and to verify that the parameters of evaluation or project remain the same, but the ownership of the project and essential decisions remain with the division or facility alone. Too often, procedures or data is overlooked or ruled insignificant and valuable data supplied by a very proficient, but maligned and trivialized subordinate operator or employee is ignored. As a result the right things do not happen and another incident that was not supposed to occur, does and an employee is seriously injured or killed. And in other instances, the proper policies are not implemented and the wrong people fired, or in even more cases, some think, the wrong ones are hired.

Here is another one that will really steam those that adhere to a certain train of thought in safety including the mantra of one large company.

• Is it true that all accidents can be prevented?

This is another example showing that the majority of odds that are stacked against us. I can guarantee that if you have the very best program or process as measured by any number of world-class programs, it is inevitable that you will have an accident someday. I am not trying to talk you into giving up or not doing your very best, but I am saying two things: Do not think it the end of the world or even that unusual if you do have an OSHA recordable incident. And, the biggest of all: Do not measure your accident injuries or OSHA statistics by OSHA rates. Until there is an automatic system that enters an OSHA incident from the medical provider into the OSHA injury tracking system, there will be discrepancies. And that process is a long way off.

We will get many chances to talk about this again. Please note that everything that I mentioned was a post-incident indictor. I would like to address some pre-incident indicators that work. I also plan to discuss how to choose mid-and-high level safety management people and the systems that you want them to implement.

Please support your insurance companies and loss prevention providers as well as your trade associations. They are all there to help you and have a world worth of material.

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