About Beacon Safety Consulting

Beacon Safety Consulting, LLC was founded to:

• Save lives and prevent injuries

• Provide professional safety management and safety training services

• Partner with clients to prevent injuries and resultant costs

• Positively impact the safety “culture” and overall performance of the organization

Our Safety Management Philosophy:

Leading companies accept safety as a Value for the organization, not just a priority. This value places their employees at the pinnacle of their operations.
Safety management enhances productivity, quality and cost control and becomes the drive for excellence, not just cost reduction. Proactive management of safety provides safer workplaces and improves all facets of the business. Values of an organization, unlike priorities or business objectives do not change. As an example, nearly all organizations value honesty. I do not know of any company that would accept an employee who steals from the company. If an individual is discovered to have stolen from the organization, they normally are fired, perhaps even prosecuted. Safety needs to be a value as well. When the safety of an organization’s employees is a value, then managers and supervisors make decisions that do not jeopardize workers well-being, even if the safety activities appear to reduce production or output.

The effective management of the safety function requires three major components; management leadership and commitment, employee involvement, and proactive safety measurements. Management leadership consists of senior management’s active, visual support of safety activities. Each manager is involved in regular activities to recognize hazards as well as participate in safety meetings and training. Additionally, the commitment towards managing safety also must include the funds and resources to ensure that all employees are included in the proactive activities that recognize hazards. This is a very difficult hurdle for most managers to meet, for it requires that line workers be included in what appears to be non-production work, such as completing Job Safety Analyses or physical hazard inspections.

Meaningful employee participation means including employees in proactive activities that will identify safety and health hazards. These activities include:

• Job safety analysis (JSA)

• Physical hazard inspections

• Employee safety and health training

• Safety/Committee meetings

• Job safety observations (JSOs)

In order for these hazard recognition activities to be effective, workers need to be educated and training in how to recognize hazards within the facility. Job safety analysis is an excellent tool to complete this objective. Physical hazard inspections are also excellent means of educating the worker, through the usage of checklists and guidelines that notes recognized hazards. Employee safety training should be partially completed by line workers as well as managers, using specific written standard operating procedures (SOPs) containing the results of JSAs. Safety committee meetings should be utilized to review the results of JSAs and JSOs to ensure that there is consistency of the tasks completed within the organization. Job safety observations “close the loop” on the implementation of SOPs/JSAs. This tool is a physical observation of how a job/task is completed. The SOP/JSA information is used to evaluate worker task completion in the required manner which includes production efficiency, quality, safety and cost control.

Proactive safety measures, also entitled leading indicators, are the metrics of an effective safety management system. Nearly all companies track accidents/injuries for workers compensation or OSHA recordkeeping purposes. Some even track near-misses or first-aid cases. Very few companies also track the completion of the hazard recognition activities listed above. Why measure safety performance?

• To provide focus, direction and common understanding

• To facilitate better decision making

• To provide feedback on organizational improvement efforts

• To support continuous improvement

• What gets measured, gets done

World class organizations realize that they have to measure the completion of positive safety indicators as well as negative. This measurement approach is equal to the measurements used in production and quality. As in these areas, if only the result is measured, e.g., number of parts, products off of the line per shift or number of defective parts per shift, then that data is similar to the number of injuries, OSHA recordables or accidents. These measurements may tell you that there is a problem but not what can be done to improve the results. It is the same with the safety function. The National Safety Council defines safety as, “The control or elimination of recognized hazards to attain an acceptable level of risk”. By this definition, a safety management system/program should be designed to recognize hazards and then take steps to reduce or when possible eliminate them. Many companies have decided, either by design or happenstance, that the “cost” of accidents is an acceptable level of risk, as long as the dollar cost does not become too high or regulators site them. In other words, safety is reactive versus proactive. When there is an injury or a fatality, then actions are taken, starting off with an accident investigation. (By the way, an accident investigation is a Job Safety Analysis after the fact.) After the investigation, if the evaluation is completed well, some component of the machine, tool, job or task that caused the injury is modified or the worker is provided with personal protective equipment. Sometimes the cause, such as a chemical or substance used is changed, modified or eliminated. All of these actions are taken after the accident or injury. Don’t misunderstand, accident investigations can be an important part of an effective safety management system, but if that is the primary tool used then the company’s safety performance will be difficult to improve or stabilize over the long term.

Safety performance is an issue with many companies. A well designed and implemented system produces improvements in safety, productivity, quality and cost control. Many organizations implement some of the successful techniques listed above. But few manage safety in a world-class manner. Safety is a value that needs to be introduced into the culture over a period of years. In this way it is very much like Total Quality Management. It takes planning, training, time and patience to implement. That is a goal Beacon Safety Consulting, LLC has the experience to assist your company with.

Safety management should be proactive not reactive.