September 6, 2017
Effective risk management starts with identifying and addressing hazards before incidents occur. While most safety professionals understand that a thorough job safety analysis (JSA) is a trusted process for evaluating workplace hazards, the challenges of carrying them out often derail companies from completing them. Furthermore, even when JSAs have been carried out, too often the initial assessments are not revisited or updated as needed to be effective.
Without a solid understanding of the hazards and risks your employees face with the tasks they accomplish each day, it’s impossible to keep them safe. The bottom line is that performing JSAs for each job or process, updating them on a regular basis and providing employees with easy access to their findings is essential to generating greater awareness of safety risks.
Let’s review the critical steps to completing an effective JSA, and discuss the many ways technology can help ease the process.
To start the JSA process, choose the jobs or tasks that need to be evaluated. Selecting the jobs – or job in some cases – to be analyzed may sound simple, but can be a vital consideration when employers have limited time and resources to analyze all of the various jobs associated with their operations. Another important consideration when picking the job to analyze is that each JSA will require revision with the introduction of new equipment, raw materials, processes or work environments. For these reasons, a good best practice is to prioritize the jobs to be analyzed. This way, even if analysis of all jobs does not occur, it will ensure that the most critical jobs are examined first.
So how do you determine which job or task to evaluate first? A good practice should be prioritized jobs using the following criteria:
• jobs with the highest injury or illness rates, • jobs with the highest potential for injury or illness, • jobs in which one simple human error could lead to a severe accident or injury, • newly implemented jobs and processes, or ones that have undergone changes in processes and procedures and • jobs complex enough to require written instructions.
Regardless of the jobs or tasks selected for evaluation, it’s critical to have accurate information about the hazards that workers performing them face. Today, mobile-optimized incident management apps can be a valuable tool for employers to evaluate and prioritize which jobs to analyze. By offering front line workers the ability to report more accurate information and data around hazards, incidents and near misses as they occur, employers more easily can identify areas where immediate analysis needs to take place.
To perform a thorough and accurate JSA, each job must be broken down into a defined sequence of individual tasks. It’s important to avoid defining individual job tasks too narrowly or too broadly. Generally speaking, a job should contain no more than ten individual tasks. If your JSA exceeds this number, consider separating the job into two or more separate phases. It also is vital to maintain the proper sequence of job tasks to ensure that during the hazard identification phase, hazards are addressed in the order they are encountered by employees.
Job task breakdown typically is accomplished through direct observation, with at least one EHS professional or direct supervisor familiar with the job and recording the series of individual tasks as they are performed by an experienced employee. Observation of an experienced employee helps ensure that job tasks are performed in the proper sequence with a high level of precaution, helping to identify unforeseen hazards more easily. This also helps ensure that all tasks, even frequently missed steps like set-up and clean-up, are being reviewed as well. Remember, if a task isn’t identified, risks can’t be identified either.
Once the observation is complete, participants should convene to review the findings and ensure that all steps sufficiently were identified.
Hazards should be identified soon after the observation and job task breakdown, while the sequence of job tasks and potential hazards still is fresh in the minds of all participants. If one or more job tasks need to be repeated, it should be done immediately, if possible.
A number of questions should be asked to assess the potential hazards in performing individual job tasks. Proceed through the sequence of job tasks one at a time and answer questions such as:
• Are there any pinch points or potential for body parts to be caught between moving machinery or objects? • Does the equipment in use present any potential hazards? • Is there a potential for slips, trips or falls? • Is there a risk of injury due to excessive strain from lifting, pushing or pulling? • Is there a risk of exposure to extreme heat or cold? • Does the task expose employees to excessive noise or vibration? • Is there potential for exposure to toxic/hazardous substances, harmful radiation or electrical hazards?
This list is by no means exhaustive, and the questions asked should reflect the unique potential hazards and work environments associated with each job. Employees performing the tasks for which the job safety analysis is being conducted should provide input and insight into the hazard identification process, and strive to consider every possible outcome in the performance of each task. Proper controls should then be developed to limit the potential for the job hazards to result in an environmental or safety incident.
This is another area where accurate hazard and injury information is important, and where technology can be a helpful resource. A simple risk analysis solution can help you produce JSAs for any job, and ensure that the risks are communicated to employees and prioritized for mitigation. This software can collect recorded injuries, illnesses, near misses and hazards also makes it faster and easier to identify trends and risk factors. The best systems allow users to create custom reports and dashboards for even greater visibility and identification of critical incident metrics and areas where a new or updated JSA is needed.
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