Appropriate safety and health management practices

Appropriate safety and health management practices are vital for the success of any firm. Notably, workplace safety and health is a multidisciplinary field whose main concern is health, safety and welfare of the persons or professionals at their place of work. In any organization or institution, including factories, safety and health aims at ensuring that health and safety working environment is fostered to have all the employees, the employers, members of the family, co-workers and many other people as they may be concerned, are protected from any negative effects that the environment may expose them to. In many countries across the world, including the United Sates have their own health and safety enhancement programs depending on their needs, protecting the employees from imminent risks posed by both external and internal activities of work.

It is important to note that the law provides that all employers is obliged to take reasonable care that would ensure that the employees are safe in their workplace. In other jurisdictions, the law has created government bodies conferring them with special powers to regulate issues pertaining to safety in the workplace. Essentially, productivity is boosted if employees are convinced that they are working in a safe environment. For example, manual laborers will work best and provide their finest services if they know that the contractor or employer consider their health matters in his or her work-plan.This report aims at showing the importance of embracing a proactive approach in mitigating safety and health hazards and also disclosing the diverse models to safety and health management.

Concerned business managers, supervisors and owners need to know the advantages achieved when considering and applying any workplace initiative.The motivation and purpose for the adoption of proactive approaches of safety and health in organizations is vital. It ensures the development of human resource hence better productivity of the employees. Embracing a proactive approach reduces financial losses that arise due to avoidable unplanned occurrences. Moreover, it is necessary to attain an adequate control over threats. Likewise, it facilitates a systematic plan to identify menaces and allocate resources to regulate them. Quality initiatives that are aimed at constant improvement are supported.

Improving H&S management

Enhancing safety and health management is achievable through setting relevant plans, supervising their implementation and finally analysis of their effectiveness. Improving safety and health management is paramount more so through adopting a proactive approach. It helps organizations identify the source of risks that might affect the normal working of workers. Additionally, this is important during the evaluation process of the already occurred risks and the prevented ones. It helps in evading the already known possible threats hence saving resources. Adopting a proactive approach is also essential to easing pressure during working hours.

Essential role of workplace safety and health

Getting workers engagement Business to business pressure

Engaging employees in all the policies set by an organization is the best way in accomplishing them. The workers therefore feel recognized hence endeavor to work hard and deliver their finest services. Moreover, this is fundamental in ensuring that all stakeholders working together are at ease with one another.

Good for business Bench-marking with other companies (in S’pore good for tendering projects)

Sharing diverse ideas with other companies helps in the improvement of safety techniques during working hours. A company gains financially if it has the best policies safety measures and offers them at a fee. If a precise firm is recognized internationally, then it can even form the basis of how health hazard evasion should be achieved.

All standard occupational safety requirements follow common and basic elements. The planning stage is the foremost followed by the performance phase. The performance evaluation stage is the subsequent one and then lastly the improvement phase.

Traditional approach are compliance based Tend to be reactive rather proactive Proactive approaches are more coordinated, sustained and systematic which are essential components to best practices

Customarily, every field has its conventional ways of conducting things. Therefore, it is the mandate of every organization to facilitate health standards in its operations. Policies should be established, clear guidelines provided on how they will work. The traditional methodology of ensuring safe conditions comprises of both reactive and lively supervision. All senior managers of firms are required charged with the responsibility of improving processes of safety.

HSG65 RCMS (Responsible Care Management System)

HSG65 RCMS identifies various factors that might pose safety and health risks to workers in their diverse workstations. The factors include personal, job and organizational factors(Wong and Choy 2015, P. 244). Organizational elements have the chief influence on group or individual behavior, however, they are easily overlooked during the design to evade accidents at work. Job factors influence personal performance; therefore, tasks should be allocated appropriately to reduce human performance limitations(Cram & Sime 2015, P. 12). Human error is increased when there is a mismatch between a person’s capabilities and work requirements. Consistent performance is encouraged when workers are not overloaded. Physical matching entails how the entire workstation and the operational environment are planned whereas mental matching involves an individual’s perception of the task and personalized information.Personal factors are weaknesses and strengths in connection to the dictates of a precise job that employees need. They include skills, attitudes and illnesses.

Importance of proactive approach

PDCA (ISO) ILO OHSM POPIMAR WHO Model for Action for Workplace Emphasis on continuous improvement with OHSMS

Protecting the health related conditions of employees by preventing job associated diseases, incidents, ill health or injuries is necessary according to PDCA (ISO). Additionally, complying with significant occupational safety and health national regulations and laws and voluntary programs to achieve the same objective is essential (Jain, 2011, P. 7). Consulting employees and their representatives ensures that they are motivated to engage actively in the health management plans.

SS506 (For all Industry basically a PDCA approach)

SS506 requires that employers meet the regulations contained in the health and safety regulations(Forouzanfar, 2013, P. 2289). The requirements have to be in relation to the Singapore Standard to enhance the safety of persons at workplace.

There are numerous specifications of responsible care and management systems. The top management of an organization is needed to establish, document and oversee the implementation of policies for the firm(Ofori, Lin and Tjandra, 2011, P. 3). The strategies should be communicated to the workers, other stakeholders and also be availed to the public. The plans are required to adhere to accountable care management schemes and be germane to scale, nature and impact of an organization’s activities, processes and products (Fronzek & Carter, 2007, P. 362). Likewise, the set procedures should demonstrate outstanding leadership, involvement and commitment from senior employees to the junior levels of the organization in association with responsible care.

PDCA (ISO) recommends that implementation of risk management is of essence. Subsequently, it provides the following guidelines(Sokovic, Pavletic and Pipan, 2010, P. 478). Create a clear design, implement the strategy as it was intended. It is also paramount to verify the blueprint developed to facilitate the delivery of the set goals. The set goals reflect on how to mitigate risk and uphold health safety(Larsson, Pousette and Törner 2008, P. 410). Acting to transform the set design in relation to the new information during the review process is key in providing a health risk free working environment.

CP 79 of the Singapore Standard outlines guidance on health and safety administration systems for construction worksites. All construction activities should be guided by standard control measures. The control measures should be formulated accordingly, evaluated and analyzed (Wang & Tsai, 2009, P. 265). All risk levels should be estimated to identify workplace hazards.Health risks necessitate prioritization so that they are effectively mitigated.

The CONCASS requires that all stakeholders in the building Industry with a total net worth of above thirty million US dollars to have compulsory health and safety systems (Chiarini, 2011, P. 113). Furthermore, it offers a standard scoring system and checklist for all permitted auditing organizations. CONSASS, with a centralized system, it provides a platform for easy comparison between workstations on their efficiency in managing health and safety related risks during work (Forouzanfar, 2013, P. 2287). Consequently, this is vital in instilling motivation in contractors to endeavor for advancement in ensuring safety at their worksites.

Ways to improve safety and health management

CultureSAFE requires that a corporate culture is nurtured to promote health and safety (Zhang & Chan, 2011, P. 140). The culture of evaluating possible health hazards is chief in ensuring organization operations run smoothly. Employees are also motivated to undertake their duties appropriately. The culture of consultation in health risks ensures that the proposed measures are appropriately adhered to(Low and Ong 2014, P. 43). The senior management should initiate a culture of setting health threat evasion objectives to signal the seriousness of the matter hence subsequent implementation.

BizSAFE is essential in outlining guidelines that facilitate health conditions during working hours. It states that risk management and evasion should not only be put on paper but also exercised. Whatever requirement that is outlined in a document should be implemented and further review done to analyze its effectiveness (Jian, 2010, P. 125). Moreover, for efficient execution of the set plan, communication between workers and employers should be encouraged. BizSAFE also requires that risk is minimized at the source initially. Eliminating health hazards should be the foremost activity to aid identify, evaluate and control various risks during work hours. Therefore, eradicating risk early ensures that no threat arises at work (Wright, Rickwood & Gibson, 2010, P. 21). On the other hand, if reducing or eradicating the danger is impossible, the appropriate action is to replace the health peril with a much safer option which can reduce the problem of the risk. Consequently, if these two ideas do not bear fruit, administrative measures, for instance, giving employees further training should be put into consideration. Another important prerequisite is to consider factors that affect the hazard (Chakravarthy, 2009, P. 18). Individual health hazards such as asthma and diabetes should be considered because they affect the working ability of employees.

The WSH provides diverse safety requirements to help attain and maintain wellbeing in the construction field(Mearns et al, 2009, P. 311). The WSH has various policies that should be followed to the latter. Some of the policies include responsibilities and duties of the employees and management, the project’s health and safety objectives and management’s assurance of the approach and commitment towards ensuring a healthy working environment. Additionally, to reduce health risks developers should review set guidelines on how contractors should design permanent and temporary buildings or structures safely (Chia et al, 2015, P. 963). Developers should collaborate and set minimum expectations with their contractors to facilitate both quality and safe construction(Teo et al, 2016, P. 15). In addition, it is also a requirement that developers single out frequent health and safety occurrences on construction sites, reveal clear work protection procedures and make sure that the equipment of contractor’s are in good condition hence observe to safe work requirements.

Engaging workers for better productivity

Key elements of Proactive Safety, Health and Wellbeing management

Successful and efficient supervision of top level executives on the commitment of junior staff ensures effective operation of activities in any organization. More so, monitoring execution of preliminary objective, for instance, safety and health hazard evasion leads a company to victory. Consequently, this owes to the fact that workers conduct the activities without fear.

Managers of diverse firms are required to portray leadership skills. In the current business environment, leadership, employee engagement and culture have become critical human resource issues. For example, the current business era is characterized by heightened corporate transparency, greater mobility of workforce as well as severe shortage of critical skills; leaders have faced issues as regards culture, retention and engagement. At this point, it is important to realize that these issues are critical to the organization. Needless to say, engagement and culture is the most important issue that faces many companies across the world with 87 percent of organizations globally citing engagement and culture as the top most challenge that quite critical as far as the productivity of the organization is concerned. Important to note is the fact that organizations that make efforts to come up with a culture that has tenets such as meaningful work, job, deep employee engagement as well as organizational fit and strong leadership have reportedly outpoured their peers and are destined to attract the top most talents across the labor market and in the event, beat all their competition. The establishment and maintenance of achievable culture on health threat avoidance during work related activities is of essence. Likewise, employee full and effective contribution is a guarantee at all times. Deviation from the already established norms is intolerable.

Any Proactive approach of safety and health should have several elements which include formulation, implementation, assessment and improvement(Kamel, 2009, P. 1947). Establishing the policy, organizing how it will work and the procedures to be applied comprise formulation. Implementation should include conveying the idea to employees, participation and acceptance monitoring. Assessment entails both reactive and active monitoring whereas improvement must consider reviewing the procedure of the safety and health risk management.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, firms need to create and maintain their own progressive culture on safety and health issues. Additionally, this will enhance employee commitment and involvement at all work levels. The culture needs to underscore that deviance from the conventional safety and health standards is not acceptable. Notably, progressive policies of managing human resource can be adversely affected by unrealistic safety and health strategies. All organizations should therefore generate specific plans to ensure they avoid ill health and accidents hence benefit all the involved stakeholders.

Importance of benchmarking with other companies

References:

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