Guide to a Safe Work Place

Maintaining a Safe Workplace is as important as running a successful business because unless you have a safe working environment, you are hardly likely to see any progress. It is a manager's job to see that all security measures are adhered to in order to keep accidents at work from occurring. Besides this, accidents can cost you a lot of money and even the loss of a day's work. It is therefore essential that you have a safe workplace that is free from any kind of health hazard, as this will keep your employees happy and they will perform better at their jobs.

It should also be noted that you alone as a manager cannot bring in all the changes or take the entire responsibility of creating a safe workplace. You will need to involve your employees to help you preserve a safe and healthy workplace. It is they who can identify and inspect hazards so that they can be avoided. For this, you may even require a training process that will help employees recognize any discrepancies that may arise due to bad equipment or machinery or any other thing that might cause health hazards. A manager should be friendly and be able to relate with the employees so that they can without any hesitation report their problems directly. A common perception that employees have is of not being able to level with their peers or seniors. This is the very notion that you need to get out of their minds by being open to their suggestions and even including them in your policies that are made for managing a safe workplace. However, running a safe workplace must begin with you and it is you who has to set the goals for the others to follow.

The very first step to avoiding accidents at work is to formulate a policy that emphasizes the benefits of a safe workplace. You must give your full commitment and expect the same from your employees. Also insist on getting to the root cause of any accidents at work so that they can be prevented from being repeated again. Assign someone who will be accountable for maintaining a safe workplace and ensure that the person understands his or her duties well or you could hold the person responsible for negligence.

The safety of your employees is of vital importance and is also their legal right. You must therefore have provisions in your safety policy that any employee exposed to health hazards at the workplace or injured in an accident at work, shall be compensated for it. You may have to pay for hospitalization or even an operation. Occupational therapy is also a good way of checking on the mental, physical and psychological well being of your employees. The need for introducing occupational therapy is being widely seen by entrepreneurs and small businesses as well.

Occupational therapy uses consequential occupations to encourage good health thereby helping people improve their work performance and do their jobs in a more balanced way. As a manager you must be able to recognize any problems that your employees may face and help resolve them and even recommend occupational therapy. Keeping a safe workplace that is free of health risks or injury is an absolute way of creating a happy environment and success for your business.

Health and Safety at Work

Not many would be aware of this, but the government has legislation for health and safety of people at work. The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 requires the employers to have proper health and safety management systems at work. The Act makes provision for securing the health of people at work, welfare and safety of the employees including the people who are not directly employed by the company like contractors and visitors.

While the law exists and it is mandatory for the employers to follow the guidelines, it is also necessary for the employees to know about their rights and duties regarding their own health & safety. Employers should conduct a General Risk Assessment to ensure the health and safety of their employees. To create awareness about health & safety at work, the employers should have proper employee induction & health and safety training programs whenever new employees join the company. The induction program should educate the employees about the safety standards, procedures and policies of the company.

The basics of health and safety at work start with having proper First Aid. Every organization big or small must have proper First Aid Kits and systems. While at work, people can suffer an injury or fall ill. It is very important for the company / firm to have proper arrangements so that the employees can receive immediate medical attention. A person who has received proper training for administering First Aid should be appointed for this.

Fire safety is of prime importance at work. The potential hazards and sources of fuel, oxygen & ignition etc. should be identified. Proper Fire detection and warning systems should be in place to prevent any mishaps. Fire extinguishers should be kept ready in different places throughout the building. There should be exit doors and escape routes in the building. Electrical equipments and wiring should be proper and checked at regular intervals. The employees should be given training on dealing with fire emergencies. Fire drill and Fire Risk Assessment should be done at regular intervals. Stress at work place is common. But if it starts affecting the health of the employee then it is a problem. Employers should identify the factors causing excessive stress to the employees. A stress risk assessment should be done to identify the potential hazards and risks. Proper measures should be adopted to control excessive employee stress. Employees should be given proper training, support and care to help them prevent & relieve the stress.

Employers should follow the norms of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations. They should assess the health risks faced by the employees from the chemicals or substances used at workplace. Proper control measures should be adopted and the same should be followed by the employees. Training and information about the health risks should be provided to the employees.

The employers are also required to have proper policies for disability health & safety. Employees with cognitive, physical, sensory, ambulant and other disabilities have a right to proper arrangements and facilities at the workplace. There should be proper access, lighting, signage, seating arrangements for the disabled. Other employees of the company should also be sensitized about the same. New and expectant mothers have a right to proper care at the workplace. The employers should identify the potential hazards to the mother as well as the baby while at work. The employers can offer alternative work, different or less work timings or paid leave to ensure the health and safety of the mother and baby. Similarly, arrangements should be made for young people at work and lone workers. A general risk assessment should be done for the security, health and safety of such employees.

It is important that the employer as well as the employee is aware of the rights and duties pertaining to health and safety at workplace. For details you can take the services of a health and safety consultant or just search for "safe work method statements" on any major search engine.

Project Management Made Easy

Complex projects require sophisticated software and scheduling tools, however simpler and more straightforward projects involving only a few people over a relatively short period of time require a much simpler approach.

Usually, a simple project management will have a few steps which are dependent on other steps taking place first, and will be relatively straightforward to coordinate. An example might be creating and implementing a marketing plan for a one person business, painting a single room, baking a cake, planning a weekend away for two, building a garden shed etc.

With simple projects, a tool such as a Gantt chart may make over complicate the project scheduling. Unless all team members are trained in the tool then the use of the tool may itself lead to poor communication and an unsatisfactory result. A simple project such as those identified above may only require a timetable and/or an action plan. All those in the project team should be communicated with as to their tasks content and timing. Timetables can then be negotiated and agreed; actions lists or diaries/calendars can be used for recording and planning purposes.

All projects have control points and required deadlines, where progress is monitored and measured. In the event that a deadline is missed then the overall impact on project completion time can be assessed, and if necessary new timetables drawn up, re-negotiated and agreed.

Action Plans are lists of tasks/individual actions that are carried out to achieve a single and objective or outcome - in this case, the specific project. Action Plans focus on the achievement of a single goal, the action may then be translated in to a to-do list/diary cum calendar which cover many goals.

Safety Education

Safety education in the United States has been mandatory for workers since the existence of the Occupation Health and Safety Administration or OSHA in the 1970's. It's hard to believe that before this time there were no laws requiring employers to provide a safe workplace to their employees. Today there are two main reasons that people receive safety education. The first is voluntary and the second is mandatory.

Voluntary Safety Education

Becoming a safety educator, OHS management plan officer, coordinator, or any other professional is a fast growing career choice. Today there are literally thousands of laws and regulations that require such training. A lot of employee in-house health and safety professionals. In addition to their own training, a safety professional is responsible for keeping the workplace free of hazardous conditions for all employees. An H&S professional often voluntarily receives and presents training in several topics. Most often they do it to enhance their own career or as a function of their job. Voluntary education is a great way to promote yourself to a prospective employer or to enhance your current career.

Mandatory Safety Education

The second reason that people receive H&S training is that they are required to. Since the OSH act was created into law, employers are required to provide training and education on topics that relate to specific jobs and duties. Many companies will dedicate specific days to training in safety. Safety is often looked upon as unnecessary or as waste of time. This is a wrong conception. It is a trainer’s job to reflect to employees just how important safety education is. It may be necessary to show examples of tragedies or accidents that could have been prevented had safety measures been taken more seriously. It's a training that should never be considered a waste of time. A company that is not doing regular training is probably not in compliance with state and federal laws. Mandatory training is required in almost every work place in the United States today.

Safety is not an option. As an employer, you have an obligation to keep your workplace as safe work method statements as possible. Keep current with these trainings with Training for Safety. If you are an employee, know that you have the right to work in a safe environment.

Project Management Plan Cycle

Project Life Cycle has four phases:

·         Initiation

·         Planning

·         Execution; and

·         Closure

The Project Initiation is the 1st phase in the Project Management Life Cycle. The most common tools or methodologies used in the initiation stage are Project Review, Plan, Overview and Schedule Reviews. You can start a new by defining its objectives, scope, purpose and list of deliverable to be produced. Professionals and skilled project team also being selected in this stage by the appointed Manager.

The Project Planning is the 2nd part in the Project Management Life Cycle. The 2nd phase should include a detailed identification and assignment of each task until the end of the assignment. It should also include a Risk Analysis and a definition of criteria for the successful completion of each deliverable according to the Schedule prepared by the Planning Engineer. It involves creating of a set of plans to help guide your team through the execution and closure of the business assignment.

The project management plan template created during this section will help you to manage time, cost, quality, change orders/variation, risk factors and other issues. They will also help you to manage key personal and external vendors/suppliers, to ensure that you deliver the project on time and within schedule.

The Project Execution is the 3rd phase in the Project Management Life Cycle. The Project Execution is usually the longest phase in the project life cycle and it typically consumes the most energy and the most resources. You will build the physical deliverable and present them to your client for approval. The most important issue in this part is to ensure activities are properly executed and controlled. You will need to implement a range of management processes during this section. These processes help you to manage time, cost, quality, change orders/variation, risks factors and issues. They also help you to manage procurement, client approvals and communications.

The most common tools or methodologies used in the execution phase are an update of Risk Analysis Review, in addition to Project/Business Plan. The planned solution is implemented/incorporated to solve the problem specified in the business requirements.

The Project Closure is the 4th and last phase in the Project Management Life Cycle. In this last stage, the Project Manager must ensure that the Business Assignment is brought to its proper completion (according to contract).

The closure section is characterized by a written formal project review report contains of overall level of success to your sponsor in the phase. Project Closure involves handing over the deliverable to your client/customer, passing the documentation to the client/business development, demobilizing/releasing staff and equipment, and informing stakeholders of the closure of the business assignment. Between one and three months after the project has been closed and the business has begun to experience the benefits provided by the project, you also need to complete a Post Implementation Review.

This review allows the business to identify the level of success of the project and list any lessons learned for future projects. 

Safety Management Series - Make It Safe, And Legal

In my professional OHS consulting practice I often see clients who have become frustrated by "chasing the regulations." Their desire to comply with the legal requirements is honourable and a very wise business choice. It also pays to make our workplaces safe and healthy for our valuable employees. This is especially true in our day and age of diminishing workforce, increased world competition and challenging economic times. A contracting company needs to stay sharp to survive.

Wanting to have a safe work method statements and to comply isn't enough; we need a strategy to make it happen. Here's what's worked successfully for many who realize that making it safe is only half of the challenge and making it legal is the second half.

Trouble is in almost all jurisdictions that I'm aware of, this act of driving through an intersection against a red light is not legal. Our goal in business is to do both.

Let's start with a simple process.

1) Find the harmful energies (Hazard Assessment)

Find the harmful energies that could cause you grief. Electrical, mechanical, chemical, kinetic, gravitational and stored energies are some examples of energies that can all find a pathway to us unless we ensure they are controlled. Being hit with unwanted energy is a sure fire way to get hurt or damage our equipment.

2) Put barriers in place to stop the harmful energies (Hazard Control)

Once defined, these energies can be eliminated or in some cases you can put barriers in place to ensure the energies don't hit us. For example, if I need to work in a trench, I'm concerned about gravity working on the stored energy of the trench walls. If I go into an un-shored/protected trench then I'm putting myself in the way of energy. I can control that energy by barriers. These barriers don't have to be physical barriers. I can use the barrier of my knowledge not to enter the trench. I can also get training to know how to build safe shoring. Shoring is a great example of a barrier that effectively protects us from harmful energy. I can also use a trench cage to ensure that if the walls of the trench do collapse that I'm safely inside the cage unharmed by the release of the potentially harmful energy.

3) Check the applicable legislation for details of the prescribed hazard controls.

So once I've looked at either eliminating the harmful energies or the barriers I can put in place, I will probably have made it "safe". To follow our trenching example I could decide to shore the trench with lumber and screw-jacks. This could keep me safe from cave-in. I could guess the size of lumber I need and the number of screw-jacks but I could guess wrong. My shoring design may keep the walls of the trench from moving in on me, but may not meet the requirements of the local OHS laws. This is where I need to go to the web to check the regulations or look it up in my OHS regulation/code book.

4) Check your industry for best practices.

In my research I should also look for industry solutions to my safety challenges. Why re-invent a trench cage when I can just go buy or rent one? What are others doing to make it both safe and legal? Industry associations focused on safety are great sources of solutions to my safety challenges. Use them relentlessly.

5) Develop the safe work process to be used.

Now that I've decided on how I'm going to do the work, I need to develop a work process so that when I do this kind of work, I and my fellow workers are protected by the process used.

6) Educate and train those who need to comply with the work process.

We all need to know what is expected of us and we should be trained to do the work we're assigned. Learning how to shore using the company procedure is a barrier to me and my fellow workers from being injured or killed in a trench cave-in.

7) Observe that the work process is being followed.

Now that we have a plan to enter trenches we need to make sure that we always do it safely, Workplace inspections and observations tell us that we're doing it right. The old quality adage "Say what you do, do what you say and measure often" works really well in safety. Not only will you be ensuring you are following your own rules, but you will be meeting the legal requirements.

When we do it right we need to tell everyone that they've done a great job! If we need to adjust our processes, now is the time to do our improvements. Well there we have it, a simple process to make it safe...and to make it legal. Hopefully this will reduce any frustration you have around meeting the details of the OHS management plan regulations. Don't miss a step, your employees and your company's well-being is relying on it!

Tips for Personal Work Safety

There are a number of personal safety concerns that can be forgotten on the job site. These may not be life or death matters, but you should at least do what you can to make them non issues. It is generally a simple process that can be carried out at a low cost. Then again, the Internet has made just about everything possible at an affordable rate.

Let's start with safety from the sun. This is obviously not an issue for most serious office workers. Just don't let your employees stand in the window for 5 hours and make sure blinds are available. Those with work outside need something that's a little tougher on the sun's rays. The easiest way to protect them is by purchasing and outfitting them with individual sunscreen packets. These are exactly what they sound like, just little packets of sunscreen that can be broken out quickly, used, and then disposed of. They have a lot of benefits. Specifically, they are needed for most serious operations. A communal bottle of sunscreen may work for a family at the beach, but it will not work for most job sites. It will be lost or misplaced and a bunch of people will go home with sunburns. Factor in the increased risk for skin cancer and you have a problem. Just buy the packets and make sure that each worker has one.

Clothes are another issue for safety and general neatness. Working clothing needs to be given for many positions in factories and general care. You don't need someone wearing sneakers and street clothes while they're working on heavy machinery. You should make sure that your employees have appropriate boots and jumpsuits. The boots are pretty easy. The jumpsuits aren't much harder though. Just order some nice material sets from a supplier. It's hard to be specific. Some need heat resistant suits while others just need suits that are tough against oil. It's your call in the end.

Finally, you will want to ensure that safety glasses are available. There are a number of situations that require such glasses. Many chemicals are bad for the eyes and a stray splash could cause serious damage. Good safety glasses will shield the eyes and ensure that it's just a minor incident. Safety glasses also work to protect the eyes from debris, so any serious construction or manufacturing work will probably need these to be standard issue. Use this tips as a safe work method statements. I hope this works a lot on you.

Make a Construction Environmental Management Plan Quickly

In the present world, where environmental concerns are a subject for governments and civil bodies alike, it may be a shock to discover that many building sites do not even have a functioning construction environmental management plan. Even where the plan is mandatory, construction companies can create plans which are simply unsuitable, and can never be properly implemented in the work site. Because most construction environmental project management plan template designs are so expensive, construction site owners think that they can save money by creating their own. However, the plan they end up with can be wrong, badly designed, or never even used.

Another reason why most construction environmental management plan folders are never looked at by the builders, and not implemented by people working at the site, is because it has been written in complicated styles which are difficult to follow, or contain information which is not suited to the current project's situation. Because these flaws are in the construction environmental management plan template which the writers used to create the document, it is difficult for expert consultants to work out what to include, and what to throw away. This leaves the construction site with a massive folder that cannot be read easily, and does not deal with the environmental issues for the site under consideration.

Creating a construction environmental management plan is not easy, particularly when you consider all the things that have to be included in the design of the plan for it to be effective. Writers must start with a road map - that is a plan of the topics the plan will discuss, the method of implementation, and which staff will be responsible for what elements of the plan. Then the writers must describe how each part of the plan will be performed, with evaluation of each part of the plan, and including details of staff training, documentation, and auditing. Then the writers will consider the Environmental impact, and any legal or governmental obligation. The plans must also include specific requirements which each construction needs, and the forms and records which will have to be produced by this. This policy will then have to be read by everyone working on the site, with proper training being given.

Rather than waste your time by trying to research all this by yourself, it makes more sense to download a construction environmental management plan template, which can then be used to form the basis of the plan which will be used by your construction site. Building the plan up can be done very quickly, in much less than a working day, and the plan will then be ready to implement.

Safety Management Series

I believe that most folks are well-intentioned when it comes to the health and safety of themselves and others. I've never actually met anyone in any company during my over three decades of OHS management plan experience who actually wanted to hurt anyone. I think the problem is that some percentage of employers, managers and workers just don't know what activities they are to engage in to really make their workplace safe. Knowing what to do and how to do those things that make a safe work situation is a fundamental requirement of efficient and effective OHS problem-solving.

Good problem-solving requires us to be both efficient and effective. A problem solved inefficiently only causes other problems. A problem solved ineffectively isn't really solved at all. There are only four possible combinations of being effective and efficient. You either are or you aren't. No matter what state you find yourself in, there are practical things to do to improve not only your results, but the processes you use to achieve those results.

Effectively efficient: Doing the right things right

This is akin to driving a well-maintained boat with a super crew on board with a well-defined plan to get to the other side of the lake. We'll not only accomplish our goals, but we'll do it in record time with few problems, if any, to resolve along the way. The plan is solid, we have the right people in place, and we just need to execute the plan. Then, of course, we need to celebrate our accomplishment.

In managing OHS management plan issues, this means that your own evidence tells you that you are managing safety in a way that results in the creation of safety. You can see the evidence of safety when you look. Workers are working without taking unnecessary risks. You can observe workers following work procedures that they helped develop and are wearing proper protective clothing and equipment. The safety rules make sense to the people who need to follow them and the safety culture is observable. It feels good to be safe. Safety isn't a "program." It's the way that your company does its work.

If you find yourself in the effectively efficient state, then please keep doing what you are doing. Continue to strive to do the right things right. Start to measure not only your activities to make it safe, but the outcomes of those activities. Make sure you celebrate your successes. If you find yourself in the effectively inefficient state, then work on your processes. Refine how you are creating safety by reducing unnecessary steps in your plans and procedures. Engage the people that actually do the work to help you define the steps to efficiently get things done. If you find yourself in the ineffectively efficient state, stop the focus on how you are trying to create safety and think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Challenge your current practices. Look for evidence-based solutions. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. If you find yourself in the ineffectively inefficient state, then just quit - just kidding! Immediately start with finding out what to do, then think about how to do it in your culture. The road to excellence will be hard work, but rewarding.

Remember that every company is in some state of your OHS management plan development and delivery evolution. Components of what you are doing to create safety may very well be in a variety of states of both efficient and effective.