Creating a safe workplace is essential for the health and well-being of employees, yet controlling hazards can be a complex and ongoing challenge. Effective hazard control prevents accidents and injuries and promotes a culture of safety and productivity. Today, we’re diving into the crucial topic of controlling hazards in the workplace and how you can implement effective strategies to ensure a safer environment.
In this post, we’ll explore the types of hazards commonly found in various work settings, the impact these hazards can have on health and safety, and practical methods for identifying and mitigating these risks. By the end, you’ll have the tools and knowledge to enhance workplace safety and foster a proactive approach to hazard management.
What You’ll Learn
- Types of Workplace Hazards: Understand the hazards that can be present in various work settings and their potential impacts.
- Impact on Health and Safety: Learn about the consequences of unaddressed hazards on employee health, safety, and overall workplace productivity.
- Effective Hazard Control Strategies: Discover practical steps and best practices for identifying, assessing, and controlling hazards to create a safer work environment.
Introduction
Controlling health and safety hazards in the workplace is one of the best ways to create a positive employee experience. While hazard control may have traditionally been viewed as a reactive response to accidents and incidents, there is now an opportunity to drive added value to an organization by being responsive. This involves responding to the output of risk management programs, proactively learning from history to identify themes, trends, and opportunities, and positively experiencing healthy and safe workplaces by choice and not by chance (Sharman, p.220).
Why Implement Health and Safety Hazard Controls
There are five fundamental reasons for implementing occupational health and safety controls.
- Protecting workers’ health and ensuring their comfort and safety by understanding the real root cause of incidents.
- Building a health and safety culture where everyone leads with safety and managers see health and safety as a positive enabler of business success.
- Expanding beyond legal compliance by considering the real return on investment.
- Protecting an organization’s reputation.
- Continually improving the work environment by understanding the factors that add risk and having a scorecard that measures what you value rather than measure.
While the impetus for hazard control may be financial, regulatory, ethical, or industrially related, they must also be realistic and cost-efficient. Management of occupational health and safety systems should be based on prescriptive principles and proactive principles (Salguero-Caparrós et al. 2020). Indeed, an indirect outcome of control may be an increase in efficiency and overall reduction of costs, and it will likely affect daily performance.
In many cases, several control options are available. Sometimes, the optimal control may not be the most practicable, and an alternative needs to be considered. Perhaps more than one control is required to reduce exposure to an acceptable level. While control may not eliminate the hazard, it will somewhat reduce the magnitude of exposure.
Health and Safety Control by Design
Ultimately, occupational health and safety risk control should begin during the design phase of a process or workplace. It is more expensive and inconvenient to attempt to redesign and retrofit. While this idealist approach may work with new operations, most hazards exist in a workplace that has been run for many years. An alternative approach is therefore needed. Let’s consider the three factors required for exposure:
- A source: the occupational hygiene hazard.
- A mechanism or path for movement of the hazard.
- An unprotected receiver.
Removal of any of these partners in the exposure triangle will minimize exposure. For example, a solvent-based paint could be substituted for a water-based alternative. Where the processes or inputs cannot be changed, the hazard transmission to the worker can be halted or, at least, reduced. Emissions such as dust, gases, and fumes could be collected or diluted with ventilation. A physical barrier may isolate the hazard from one workplace area to another.
The last option for control is to stop the hazard at the worker. These controls are least preferred as they rely on human behavior and accept the risk has not been eliminated or reduced in another way. Training, education, worker rotation, and personal protective equipment are strategies that can be tried.
The Hierarchy of Control
The hierarchy of control is a list of options placed in a preferred order. It addresses the three mechanisms for exposure reduction with an alternative categorization scheme:
- Elimination of the hazard.
- Substitution of the hazard by replacing it with something that does not produce a hazard or produces a lesser risk.
- Engineering, by ventilation or isolation.
- Administration, including work organization, job design, working conditions, training, or job instructions.
- Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
Prioritization of the implementation of control measures will depend on the risk, but the timescale in which the measures are introduced may not always follow the ratings. For instance, it may be more convenient to address a low-level risk at the same time as a high-level risk. What is important here is to align risk control with the organization’s vision, purpose, aspirations, and needs.
Summary
Controlling occupational health and safety hazards is an integral component in managing risk. The hierarchy of control may be used as a guide to select controls that are practicable, cost-effective, and minimize risk.
The hierarchy begins with elimination, then substitution, engineering controls such as ventilation, isolation, and guarding; administrative controls; and personal protective equipment. As much as possible, controls should be selected from the top of the hierarchy of control. However, in certain circumstances, the use of personal protective equipment may be the only option open to workplaces.
Helpful Resources
- Recognition, Evaluation and Control of Workplace Health Hazards, by Joel Haight
- Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents, by James Reason
- My LinkedIn Post on Psychosocial Risk
Bibliography
Salguero-Caparrós, F., Pardo-Ferreira, M. C., Martínez-Rojas, M., & Rubio-Romero, J. C. (2020, January). Management of legal compliance in occupational health and safety. A literature review. Safety Science, 121, 111-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.08.033
Sharman, A. (2018). Naked Safety – Exploring the Dynamics of Safety in a Fast-Changing World. Taylor & Francis Group.
