Safety Assessment Part 6: Characterize, Identify, and Prioritize

Putting together a full safety assessment for your facility is a lot of work, but work that is well worth it. It can save you thousands of dollars and help to protect your family of employees. If you’ve followed the other steps in this blog series, you’ve probably gathered an abundance of information on the safety hazards and issues that are present in your workplace.

What now? While crucial to the whole process, just gathering the information doesn’t do a lot to prevent future accidents. Now you have to do something with that information.

Once you’ve determined where your risk factors are in your workplace, it’s time to prioritize them. Follow these three steps to establish your plan of attack. 

Characterize Safety Hazards

Let’s face it; not all safety hazards are created equal. Look closely at each hazard that popped up on your radar as you performed your safety assessments. What is the true risk factor of each item?

To characterize risk, you need to look at two main factors: likelihood and exposure. How likely is it that each hazard will create an accident or incident? If there is an incident, how bad could it be?  Keep in mind how many employees could be exposed and how severe the damage could be to those workers.

Identify Interim Measures

Finding permanent solutions to every hazard on your list could take a significant investment of time and money. Look for opportunities to implement interim safety measures to mitigate risk and keep your employees safe until you can create a more permanent solution. 

While interim measures may not seem ideal, they can bridge the gap between discovery and permanent solutions as a means to keep your workers safe without breaking the bank.  

Prioritize Safety Hazards

Consider rating each known safety hazard on a scale of one to ten for likelihood and exposure. 

Make a list that prioritizes the hazards from the most significant risk to the least. Plan to address these safety hazards in that order, taking care of the most dangerous ones first and working your way towards the less threatening. However, if there are lower-ranking risks that you can quickly address with minimal time and financial investment, feel free to knock those out. But, the hazards that sit atop your list, glaring with potential danger, need to be the primary focus of your safety plan moving forward. 

Every day that a known risk remains unresolved is a day that could bring disaster to your company.

It’s Time for Action

Knowledge is a wonderful thing. The process of doing a risk assessment in your facility can help you gain a lot of it. But, knowledge without action doesn’t keep your workers safe. 

Develop your plan to address each of the safety hazards you’ve discovered, whether it’s a long-term correction or a short-term fix. Then, create your plan for the future. 

Your goal is to remove or minimize any risk you see in your facility. That means you’ll need to keep on top of things and repeat the process regularly as new equipment, procedures and personnel are added to the picture. Workplace safety is an ongoing challenge. Your safety program should strive to eliminate or reduce any current risks and establish a plan to discover and avoid hazards in the future.

Your employees keep your business running. It’s your job to keep them safe.

Resources:

Download OSHA’s Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs