Loss Causes: Not Creating or Communicating Expectations, Policies, Procedures or Rules
By Bob Lapidus, CSP, CSMS
Have you ever been blind-sided?
- You thought you were doing what you were supposed to be doing and then out of the blue someone tells you that you are not doing it right.
- Founded on all the information you had been given, you made a decision. Then you are informed it was an incorrect decision based upon other information you had not been given.
In such cases, you were blind-sided. You had not been given everything you needed to know. Expectations, policies, procedures or rules had never been created or the ones that had been created were incorrect or else they had not been communicated. You were just supposed to know what to do as if somehow magically you could read someone else's mind.
It's like being hit over the head by a two by four. Not only do we feel stupid, but we may have caused something bad to happen. Many accidents have been caused by an employee who had not been given the correct expectations, policies, procedures or rules.
Hindsight is a wonderful reactive tool to use to identify our mistakes, but what we need to have is proactive foresight, the ability to anticipate potential problems. To achieve such wisdom takes critical thinking and time to seek potential issues that could cause a mishap. We are looking here at knowledge, skills, judgment, conditions, and actual practices.
Job Safety Analysis (JSA) or Job Hazard Analysis (JHA) are two techniques to identify potential safety problems associated with a given task. Each one lists the steps involved in a single task, seeks to identify hazards involved in each step, and establishes actions that should be taken to eliminate or at least minimize the associated hazards.
In some cases, tasks are changed to improve the safety of the work to be performed. The order in which a task is performed must be ascertained. Proper personal protective equipment is selected. Any information needed to do the job safely is integrated into the task such as information from Safety Data Sheets.
Rather than being blind-sided, employees are fully informed as to how the job is supposed to be done efficiently, productively and safely.
Nothing is perfect. Errors can be made when analyzing a task, but the system is continuous. As work is performed, the analysis is improved upon and every attempt is made to eliminate identified problems.
Employees are initially trained on how to do the work. At least annually they are given refresher training to assure they still are doing the work as designed.
Preventing being blind-sided enables everyone to do their work with correct knowledge, skills and judgment leading to a safe work experience.
The ideas for Points to Ponder articles come from Safety Center's 12-day Safety Management Specialist Certificate (CSMS) program, and from Safety Center's short course entitled Safety Management for Employees-Who Supervise. Check out these course descriptions at www.safetycenter.org or contact Quen Cach in the Northern California office at 800-825-7262 or Gayleen Grigoreas in the Southern California office at 909-625-9650.