This material is for training purposes only. Its purpose is to inform Oregon employers of best practices in occupational safety and health and general Oregon OSHA compliance requirements. This material is not a substitute for any provision of the Oregon Safety Employment Act or any standards issued by Oregon OSHA. For more information on this online course and other OR-OSHA online training, visit the Online Course Catalog.

MODULE FIVE: PROVIDING ADEQUATE SUPERVISION

Introduction

Russell DeReamer, author of Modern Safety Practices, considers the supervisor the only person who can control employees, machines, and working conditions on a daily, full-time basis.

Adequate safety supervision is best thought of as identifying and correcting hazards and behaviors in the workplace before they cause an injury or illness.

To meet the criteria stated above, supervisors may use a number of effective methods: These include observation, inspection, job hazard analysis and incident/accident analysis. In this module, we'll be discussing these important methods as well as important strategies to control hazards once they are identified.

Four Important Strategies to Identify and Correct Hazards

Your ability to identify hazardous conditions and unsafe work practices and correct them defines your effectiveness in safety supervision. There are four basic processes for identifying and correcting hazards. Let's take a look at each of these processes.

Informal/Formal Observation

An informal observation process is nothing more than being watchful for hazards and unsafe behaviors throughout the work shift. No special procedure is involved. All employees should be expected to look over their work areas once in a while.

One of the most effective methods to collect useful data about the hazards and unsafe behaviors in your workplace is the formal observation process. For example, safety committee members or other employees may be assigned to complete a minimum number of observations of safe/unsafe behaviors during a given period of time. This data is gathered and analyzed to produce graphs and charts reflecting the current status and trends in employee behaviors. Posting the results of these observations tends to increase awareness and lower injury rates. But, more importantly, the data gives valuable clues about safety management system weaknesses.

Observation, is important because we can effectively identify behaviors and conditions that account for 98% of all workplace injuries. The next process just can't do that as well.

One caution: An important requirement for successful formal observation processes is that they not, in any way, be linked to discipline. Observers should be employees, not supervisors or other managers. It's fine to express appreciation when safe behaviors are observed, but observers should not discipline or "snitch" on employees: To do so ensures the process will fail. The appropriate response is to warn the employee of the danger.

It's hard to observe work stuck in an office

If the supervisor is stuck back in the office all-day-every-day, how can he or she detect hazards and, more importantly, unsafe behaviors? The answer is to delegate oversight to another employee. When the supervisor does uncover a hazard or unsafe behavior, actions should be taken to make sure the hazard or behavior is corrected. The Safety Inspection

Another important activity to help ensure a safe work area is to conduct an effective walkaround safety inspection or audit. If your company relies solely on the safety committee to identify workplace hazards during the quarterly inspection, it's possible the effort may be ineffective.

Because the job of maintaining a safe and healthful work area is a primary employer responsibility, it's wise management policy to require the supervisor to perform safety inspections. In fact, OAR 437, Div. 1, Rule 760(7) states that a "qualified" person(s) must inspect as often as the "type of operation or the character of the equipment requires." Who, but the supervisor is best positioned to effectively identify and correct workplace hazards?

Remember, safety is a "line" responsibility. As an agent of the employer, the supervisor (not the safety committee) has the greater responsibility and more frequent opportunity to fulfill this responsibility. I think it's wise policy to require the supervisor to inspect their work area at the beginning and end of each shift to make sure hazards are addressed daily.

As you conduct the inspection, you should be looking at the hazards associated with the four categories discussed earlier (materials, equipment, environment, people). In some instances using an inspection checklist may be a good idea to make sure a systematic procedure is used. The only downside from using a checklist regards the "tunnel vision" syndrome: Hazards not addressed on the checklist may be overlooked.

How to build an effective safety inspection checklist

Step One: Determine the work area to be inspected, and the type of work being accomplished.

Step Two: Talk with the safety manager, workers' compensation insurer, or OSHA consultant to determine what safety rules apply to the work area. Obtain copies of the rules.

Step Three: Select the rules that you feel directly apply to your work area. Many rules may not have significant impact on the work area you are responsible for.

Step Four: Change each selected rule into a checklist question. Be sure to state the question as concisely as possible.

Step Five: Ask employees who work in the area for recommended checklist questions.

The result of following these procedures to build a checklist that closely mirrors those hazards that OSHA will be evaluating. It might be a good idea to use an expert resource, such as those listed in Step Two, to evaluate the checklist you have developed.

Make everyone an inspector

As a supervisor, you probably don't want to be the only person inspecting for safety in your work area. You can, of course, delegate that responsibility to your workers. It's good policy for employees to conduct an informal safety inspection of their workstation at the beginning and end of each shift. It's also good policy for supervisors to do the same for their area of responsibility. If these two policies are followed, and identified hazards corrected, the safety committee is not likely to discover many hazards during their quarterly inspection.

But how do you get employees to willingly inspect for safety every day? Simple, (that's right...it doesn't have to be difficult) you set the example yourself by inspecting regularly. You insist, not encourage, they inspect, and you recognize (thank) your workers for inspecting and reporting hazards. We'll talk more about that more in Module Three. The Job Hazard Analysis

Another effective activity to ensure a safe and healthful workplace is the Job Hazard Analysis (JHA). In the JHA, you and your employee together analyze each step of a particular task and come up with ways to make it safer.

The JHA goes far beyond the walk-around inspection in its ability to eliminate or reduce most causes for accidents in the workplace.

Why the JHA?

The problem. Unfortunately, the typical walk-around inspection may just be a superficial assessment that merely attempts to determine if a hazard is present or not. It's conducted by one or two persons who walk around looking high and low to uncover hazardous conditions (I call this the "rolling eyeball syndrome"). If properly trained, they may effectively uncover hazards. If properly trained they may know how to effective question employees during the inspection (questions other than "any safety complaints?"). One serious weakness inherent in the inspection process may be that insufficient time is giving to analyzing any one particular work area. The fix. The Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) is not plagued with all these problems. This team process goes beyond mere assessment by truly analyzing the conditions and practices related to one specific task. The JHA process will:

Break the job task down into specific steps;
Analyze each step to uncover hazardous conditions and unsafe work practices;
Develop strategies to correct hazardous conditions and unsafe work practices; and
Develop safe work practices for each step when hazards and practices can't be eliminated.
Develop safe and efficient work procedures for the entire job.

The chief advantage is that adequate time is given to analysis of both hazardous conditions and unsafe work practices. Consequently, it may be possible to eliminate or reduce all of the causes for a potential accident. This advantage makes the JHA far more useful and beneficial in preventing accidents in the workplace. Although the occupational safety and health rules do not specifically require JHA's be accomplished on all hazardous tasks, we strongly recommend a formal JHA program conducted jointly by supervisors and employees. It makes very good business sense.

Incident/Accident Analysis - Fix the system, not the blame

An incident/accident analysis can be quite helpful in uncovering the surface and root causes of near misses and accidents.

Don't play the odds!

If someone offered you a jar full of jelly beans, and told you that one of the jelly beans was laced with cyanide, would you eat one? I don't think so.

If you were told by your airline that their planes crash ten times a year, would you fly with them? Probably not. Yet in the workplace, we don't think about the odds of injury.

It's a proven fact that analyzing incidents or near-misses is an extremely effective process (and always smarter than accident analysis) for a number of reasons: No one gets hurt, and the employer doesn't have to for direct and indirect accident costs.

An accident investigation process that is conducted merely for the purpose of placing blame is generally considered "reactive" because it not only begins after the fact (the accident). Sadly, once the blame is determined, the analysis stops. The process does not affectively address contributing safety management system weaknesses (root causes). However, if the purpose of an accident analysis is to uncover the underlying system weaknesses that contributed to the accident, the analysis will first try to uncover root causes, and thus, become a suitable "proactive" tool.

In the typical accident investigation you will:

Secure the accident scene to prevent material evidence from being removed.
Gather information through observation, interviews, and documentation.
Determine the sequence of events prior to, during and immediately after the accident.
Determine the conditions and practices (surface causes) and system weaknesses (root causes) that contributed to the accident.
Develop immediate and long-term corrective actions.
Write a comprehensive report.

Read the following short scenario.

Bob, a new employee in the maintenance department, was told to remove a jammed conveyor belt. At the conveyor belt, he discovered a wad of plastic had become tangled in a belt. As soon as he removed the plastic, the conveyor started up. Unfortunately, Bob's hand got caught in an incoming nip point and was severely injured.

It might be relatively easy to determine what the surface causes for the accident in this scenario, but what might be the most likely root cause(s)? If you had difficulty answering this question, take OR-OSHA Course 102, Accident Investigation.

Here's an example from Christine H. that helps us see what can happen when incident/accident investigation doesn't work:

I worked in a small office and we had an obviously limited budget for office equipment. We had a shredder that was used to rid our office of paperwork that was considered confidential. We all had fought with jams in this machine from day one. We had a new employee that was soon given the task of shredding a large quantity of paper. This employee was not shown how to turn off the machinery. Everyone thought it would be common sense not to work on the interior of the machine without turning it off. This employee took the cover off the shredder to remove a jam and her ring got caught in the teeth. She was lucky enough to only get a minor cut from this as another employee pulled the power plug to stop the machine.

No one trained our next new employee even after that incident and the scenario played out again. This time the new employee caught her sleeve in the teeth and she was rushed to the hospital for a cut to her wrist that wouldn't stop bleeding. She lost a lot of work time and the company was sued for an unsafe environment.

Hazard Control Strategies

All of the methods we've discussed thus far can be very proactive in identifying hazards and unsafe behaviors, but what strategies do you use to eliminate or reduce the hazards? OSHA requires employers to take action once they know about hazards in their workplace. What strategies work best? Let's take a look the primary categories of hazard control strategies:

Engineering Controls. These control strategies eliminate or reduce the hazard by replacing or redesigning equipment, tools, materials, or machinery. This strategy, once implemented, does not usually depend on human behavior for success. The intent of OR-OSHA law requires employer to first consider these strategies because they can effectively eliminate the hazard. If there is no hazard, you don't have to continually control exposure by managing employee behaviors.

Management Controls. These strategies reduce exposure to hazards through:
- Revising/improving work procedures and practices. Writing and implementing safety policies, procedures and practices attempts to control exposure to an existing hazard. It really does nothing to eliminate or reduce the hazard, itself. Writing policy and procedures related to the use of personal protective equipment is a good example of a management control.
- Revising/improving work schedules, job rotation, and job enrichment. For example, employees may be allowed to work in a high noise area for only 4 hours during a shift. Workers may rotate through various tasks during the shift. Again, the idea is to limit exposure to the hazard. Once again, management control strategies work only as long as employees behave.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). PPE does not reduce or eliminate a hazard, but merely sets up a barrier between the worker and the hazard. Of course, the success of a PPE policy is dependent upon many variables including; effective system design, implementation, and employee compliance.
Interim Measures. These are temporary use of engineering and management controls to reduce exposure until permanent controls can be applied. These measures might include temporarily placing cones to prevent access, etc.

Well, it's about time we get to the module quiz. Answer each of the questions below

Module Review Quiz

36. "Adequate supervision" may be thought of as __________ and __________ a hazard before it causes an injury or illness.

a. identifying, correcting
b. inspecting, identifying
c. identifying, reporting
d. detecting, ignoring

37. The four hazard areas discussed in this course include:

a. materials, equipment, environment, employee
b. machinery, guarding, ppe, fall protection
c. management, control, organization, communication
d. mmh, LO/TO, hazcom, confined space

38. Which hazard control strategy below should you consider first to eliminate or reduce a hazard?

a. Automatic Controls
b. Engineering Controls
c. Management Controls
d. Disciplinary Controls

39. Facility design, hazardous atmospheres, temperature, and noise are examples of hazards in the _________ environment:

a. psychic
b. physical
c. psychosocial
d. physiological

40. Why is the investigation described below ineffective?

Rod C., one of our past students related that...When working at a shipping company unloading large trucks, I split my head open on an exposed iron L-beam. My injury required 10 stitches. The exposed beam was in a high volume traffic flow area and painted gray. I suggested either foam padding and/or colorful paint (red or yellow) be used to highlight the potential hazard. The idea was dismissed and personal blame was assessed for being "clumsy and unaware."

a. the suggestion was trivialized
b. root causes were not analyzed
c. blame was the primary response
d. all of the above

41. Factors such as workload, scheduling, quality of training, and work relationships are examples of the ______________ environment.

a. psychic
b. physical
c. psychosocial
d. physiological

42. Which of the following is not discussed in the course as one of the four effective processes to identify hazards?

a. observation
b. job hazard analysis
c. inspection
d. training

43. Which of the following processes is best at detecting the causes for most accidents in the workplace.

a. observation
b. job hazard analysis
c. inspection
d. incident/accident analysis

44. According to the text, an accident investigation process that is conducted for the purpose of placing blame is generally considered a ____________ process:

a. proactive
b. effective
c. inactive
d. reactive

45. Which of the following is the least effective strategy to get employees to willingly conduct safety inspections?

a. recognize employees for inspecting
b. set the example by inspecting yourself
c. provide a checklist
d. threaten discipline

Congratulations on completing module five! If you haven't been working on the course assignments yet, now is the time to download the assignments page to draft your responses. I hope the information within these five modules as been helpful to you and I hope to see you participate in another course soon. When you're ready, go to the Course Assignments and Quiz web page to submit your coursework, evaluation, and certificate information. I'll see you in a workshop or another internet course! If you have any questions or comments, just drop me an email at larry.fipps@state.or.us.

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