How to Join the Safety Culture Movement: Part 4
Promptly Identify and Address Hazards
This topic is covered in Module 3 of our Safety Culture 100 online course. To protect yourself and others from harm or danger, we all must play our role in identifying both physical safety and mental health hazards.
The unsettling news is that there is no elevated plateau, from which, we can kick-up our feet and no longer concern ourselves with the threat of hazards. The moment we stop innovating in our identification of hazards, we create a perfect storm of risk and immediately expose ourselves and others to life-altering incidents. The threat hazards can provoke is always present – they’re chasing after you and lurking behind corners.
Now that we’re sufficiently alarmed, here’s the great news – the risk that hazards pose can be controlled through either elimination, substitution or mitigation. The key is to stay ahead of the hazards. They’re constantly trying to gain ground, but if we continue to build literal and figurative barriers between the hazard and our people, we can significantly diminish a hazard’s ability to reach out and tangle us in an incident.
This proactive attitude is fuelled by the belief that everyone wants to go to work, do their job well and get home safe. We accomplish the goals set out in this belief through many means – with one of the most significant being the effective addressing of hazards.
Making a commitment to continuously identify and address hazards is a fantastic method for keeping your Safety Culture on its toes. Tracking performance of your Safety Culture over time is a very important part of ensuring safe and healthy behaviour – but it does require patience to see the results and improvement. Identifying and addressing hazards can act as an antidote to this urge for action and progress.
Because identifying and addressing hazards is such an active, go and do process, it provides a lot of immediate gratification. Those involved in the process can feel good that they are making the workplace safer in real time and that provides a healthy dose of positive reinforcement for the Safety Culture movement.
An additional benefit that comes out of conducting frequent hazard assessments is the ongoing behaviour and mindset it stimulates. After awhile, it’s just what you do for everything you do. By routinely conducting hazard assessments, you condition yourself to identify hazards continuously – it just becomes part of your approach. You begin to wonder how you ever went without it.
Here are some quick tips for applying this process:
1) Identify the types and locations of activities in your workplace.
- Ensure you have an innate understanding of everything that goes on in your work environment. By understanding the ins and outs of activities, it will be much simpler for you to imagine potential hazards that could result from that type of work.
2) Check if any activity could cause harm.
- Discuss potential threats with colleagues familiar with the details of the work.
3) Reduce risks by removing the hazard, modifying the work, and protecting others.
- We must make sure everyone is able to go home safe – identifying and addressing hazards is the most immediately impactful way to accomplish this.
4) Verify best practices are being followed and workers are being protected.
- Be familiar with industry leading techniques for your field. We should be meeting best practices and forging the path to new and improved methods, above and beyond those standards.
5) Improve by evaluating what could be done to elevate safety.
- Never rest on your systems or success. Continuous improvement is the only way to keep hazards from gaining on you and your people.
By continually identifying and addressing hazards, you will find comfort in the knowledge that you are being proactive about your own health and safety, and that of others.
To learn more about the Safety Culture movement, click any of the below:
