Businesses are required to provide a safe working environment for all employees. A fundamental piece of this is risk management. Employees’ skills in successfully managing risks and workplace hazards are critical to creating a safe work environment. Employees need to recognize, recall, report, and rectify workplace hazards. This blog outlines major steps that employees should take while in the hazard reporting process that will be useful for all business environments.
Who is Responsible for Conducting a Hazard Assessment?
Conducting hazard assessment is a responsibility of both employees and employers. Your employees must have good hazard perception skills, but organizations know they don’t do that very well. One strategy that organizations use to increase hazard awareness skills is to put up safety posters. It is essential to find more effective ways to raise your employees’ hazard awareness skills so that they can actively recognize, recall, report and rectify workplace hazards.
Hazards need to be processed and assessed by employees to determine whether they’re likely to injure or harm them. And this is problematic when they do the same job day in, day out with repetitive tasks because complacency sets in and they can’t see the wood for the trees. Once a hazard has been recognized, it needs to be assessed as to the level of harm and injury to an employee. And if that’s deemed significant enough, then you report and record it, and then you can go about rectifying the problem.
What are the Different Hazards in Workplaces?
If you think about hazards in your day-to-day life, the cars on a busy road that you need to cross are all hazards. Whereas a risk is the chance, whether it’s high, medium or low, that the hazard will cause harm. When crossing the road, the risk of cars hitting you is based on how far away the cars are from you. To put this into a workplace perspective, a hazard is anything in the workplace environment that might cause any person entering the workplace harm, and a risk is the likelihood that it will.
Organizations need to manage these hazards and risks in a workplace because some additional hazards and risks come into play in a workplace that you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to if you weren’t in the workplace. Every workplace is legally responsible for maintaining a healthy and safe environment and for taking measures to manage hazards and mitigate risks. There are three different categories of workplace hazards.
- A physical hazard is anything in the environment that could cause harm to your physical body. This includes vibration, heights, noise and confined spaces. Some examples of physical hazards include wires left lying on the floor, faulty electrical appliances, slippery or wet floors, and falling objects from high shelves.
- A psychosocial hazard refers to aspects of work that can lead to psychological harm to someone. Some examples of psychosocial hazards are work-related stress, bullying and harassment, and fatigue. Identifying hazards should be part of your everyday work tasks. It is everyone’s responsibility to report hazards in the workplace.
- Chemical hazards are caused by chemicals that might come in solid, liquid or gas form and may be hazardous through direct contact or inhalation. Some examples include pest control substances, cleaning agents, oven cleaners, and bleach.
Explain Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment in Brief
You need to be aware of the broad array of hazard identification and risk assessment that could help from impacting your people and assets. It’s important to understand the difference between hazards and risks, so let’s break it down. Hazards have the potential to cause harm. It can be helpful to categorize workplace threats by internal and external risks.
There are 3 types of hazards. The three types of hazards are Obvious, Emerging and Hidden. An obvious hazard is visible. For example, an oil spill or a chemical spill on the floor of the workshop. An emerging hazard will happen over time. So things like cracks in handrails or corroding infrastructure on stairwells. A hidden hazard is one that you can’t see. For example, noisy environments with long-term hearing damage or exposure to carbon monoxide gases. Now you need your employees to be able to recognize all three types of hazards because only then can they report and rectify them.
A risk assessment, also called a threat assessment, is a process for evaluating the likelihood and impact of perceived threats on your organization. Indeed, a company can’t eliminate operational risk, but it’s certainly possible to minimize it. And the good news is, the risk assessment process doesn’t have to be difficult, time-consuming, or costly. Business threat assessments play a vital role in protecting employees, operations, and facilities, and every company should include them in a risk mitigation program. Why? Because you can use the information uncovered in the assessment to proactively develop risk mitigation strategies that help you prepare and respond to any threats that come your way.
Internal threats are often more readily apparent and include things like physical workplace hazards, such as working with hazardous materials, frayed cords or wiring, working from heights or slips, trips, and falls. IT issues like internet outages, system downtime, or corrupted data. Utility outages, including things like water, sewage, or air conditioning and heat. And accidents due to structural collapses or mechanical breakdowns. External threats require you to monitor wider variables. Here are some examples. Severe weather, such as hurricanes, thunderstorms, heat waves, and natural disasters, like earthquakes or wildfires.
What are the Roles and Responsibilities of Employees at Work?
The roles and responsibilities of employees and employers are of utmost importance for the well-being of employees and the success of a business. A Safety Management System (SMS) is a systematic approach to managing safety, which includes the development and implementation of safety policies and procedures, hazard identification and control, and continuous improvement. Both employers and employees have specific responsibilities under an SMS that are critical to its success. Roles and responsibilities of employees and employers under a Safety Management System (SMS), including-
- Providing a safe and healthy work environment for employees.
- Identifying and controlling workplace hazards to prevent accidents and injuries.
- Developing and implementing safety policies and procedures.
- Ensuring that employees receive proper safety training.
- Regularly inspecting and maintaining equipment and facilities.
- Investigating accidents and near-miss incidents to determine their causes and prevent future occurrences.
- Keeping accurate records of workplace injuries, illnesses, and accidents.
- Providing emergency response plans and procedures.
- Encourage employee involvement in the SMS, such as through safety committees or suggestion programs.
- Continuously reviewing and updating the SMS to ensure its effectiveness in preventing accidents and injuries.
Conclusion
Formal hazard assessment is focused on individuals and their specific tasks, while site-specific hazard identification looks at specific operations or work environments to identify the hazards. The most basic control in business risk management is employee threat assessment training. Ensure your entire organization knows and understands what threats may occur. Reporting hazards to employees is a must, and they should be trained in how these threats may impact their role and business. Training will help them better understand the response plan and how they should act during an emergency, especially for high likelihood threats.
