Patty's Industrial Hygiene, Hazard Recognition. Группа авторов

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ are an essential component of this risk communication process. EHS professionals should not be surprised when workers understand this system so well that they begin building a solid case, using discipline‐appropriate language, for why a given task should be RL2 and not RL3. Discussions like these assist all stakeholders in breaking down work areas into tasks that are to be evaluated for where in the RLBMS spectrum of the RL1 to RL4 bands do the EHS disciplines place each of these tasks. As a result, employees, their managers, and EHS staff have a clear layout for prioritization of upcoming work with the RL4 and RL3 tasks becoming the most important areas for focusing resources. It has been found in practice that approximately 75% of standardized tasks fall into the RL1 and RL2 categories (32). A documentation of these controls for each task begins the process of affording the workers the trust that is necessary for achieving a clear, practical, and mutual risk communication that can create a proactive approach to primary prevention and provide a path toward a safe and healthy work environment.

      6.1 Participatory EHS and Risk Communication

      Successful EHS performance is often based on lagging indicators like frequency rates and lost time work‐related injury and illness. Often ignored are the attitudes and perceptions of workers in this process, an essential component of a healthy and safe work climate. Participation at work is a general technique of giving employees an opportunity to control the design of their workplace and plan their work activities. Participatory EHS is an expansion of this strategy, integrating workers into the thought processes of the field practitioners and harnessing their input toward the development of an EHS program. With a common language for discussing workplace hazards and controls in hand, this multidisciplinary process provides a mutual communication of risk and identification of solutions that can also become a powerful management tool (45). Worker attitudes toward accident and incident prevention in relation to management commitment and level of involvement are important for promoting safe workplaces. Appropriate risk perception was found to be significantly correlated to risk behavior and is related to the occurrence of accidents and near misses (46). Therefore, an employee's safe work attitude can be positively influenced when they consider themselves an integral part of a safety culture approach. This attitude is enhanced with a participatory EHS program, itself becoming a measurable performance indicator of a successful safe and healthy workplace (47).

Though worker participation in reducing workplace hazards is often called for in research, underlying ideologies of management control and worker empowerment need to be fully understood to ensure a long‐lasting participation in practice over time (14, 48). Participatory approaches focusing on worker input to achieve good practices and acceptable controls have an excellent track record of successful implementation over time and for establishing improvements in technical areas including materials handling, risk assessment, and comprehensive work organization (49, 50). Once participatory methods for developing risk assessments are in practice, ongoing facilitation with training tools, checklists, and group involvement assists in maintaining and evaluating these applications positively (50).

      The RLBMS is, therefore, the nexus of the participatory approach toward workplace risk management and risk communication, where EHS discipline expertise and collective worker input meet. Building an effective corporation requires this comprehensive feedback approach as it tears down existing preconceptions, rules, and institutional customs in order to build a more effective and functional EORM system (51, 52). EHS field practitioners have an innate understanding of the workforce that is necessary to identify existing practices and organizational structures to determine the correct organizational direction. EHS disciplines are also in an appropriate position to promote a positive course for management to enhance their organization. Conversely, with a lack of productivity and profitability identified in an existing EORM system, EHS disciplines must also identify these weaknesses to ensure the negative organizational direction does not persist. Participatory methods in the collective redefining and rebuilding of an EHS organizational structure has been shown to achieve the risk communication necessary to receive the buy‐in of managers and workers alike, as this approach assists in achieving a collective vision of the ideals, objectives, and goals of a successful, organizationally‐specific, EORM.

      6.2 Turning Risk Knowledge into Action

      The premise of participatory EHS is that workers know their workplace better than anyone else. With a mutual sharing of information by workers and their EHS staff, an elevated knowledge of workplace risk is created that allows them to develop a more comprehensive approach to their daily tasks. The amount of control that workers are given over their workplace is an important element, as well as a potential limitation, for the effectiveness of the participatory process. By definition, managers have a level of control over their workplace that is not available to the workers. Without an appropriate incentive, management is not usually willing to truly empower workers to determine their own solutions. In addition, a situation in which workers do not have a climate of trust between themselves and upper management can, in and of itself, add to their workplace risk factors (11, 53).

      This problem exists as much in developed nations as in economically developing countries. Unfortunately, lack of worker empowerment is not consistent with the fact that workers are usually the ones who know their job and their peers well enough to identify and create solutions that will persist (54). However, management can be in a position to give a certain level of control to the workers when their production costs increase due to workplace incidents, accidents, and regulatory fines. These increased costs can often be related to decreased working efficiency, employee turnover rates, absenteeism, medical care, and worker's compensation . Participatory EHS and the RLBMS strategy present a synergistic opportunity for the process to be implemented in a manner that significantly increases workplace risk knowledge and offers an opportunity to improve working efficiency and employee satisfaction that can reduce issues relating to production costs. Therefore, both management and workers have a vested interest to translate this risk knowledge into action that is geared toward achieving these objectives. In addition, should management need to bring a request for additional to accomplish these objectives to the corporate board of directors, it is good to know that they also use comparable risk matrices to derive levels of risk as part of a standard board room language.

      6.3 Risk Communication for EHS Results

      The simplified risk communication language provided by RLBMS and its framework brings together the roles and responsibilities of workers and expertise of EHS field practitioners to create a comprehensive EORM that is built with a bottom‐up approach. EHS staff become an essential part of translating this knowledge into action in not just raising the consistent issues facing them over the years but also presenting an integrated component in developing solutions that are positive for everyone involved. Through this process, the RLBMS provides a comprehensive knowledge approach to workplace risk management that can be compiled and sold to upper management as a benefit to operations and a cost‐effective approach for highly stressed and shrinking EHS resources. In implementing the participatory approach, EHS staff meet with their workforce and begin by exchanging their knowledge on the most commonly performed tasks and their related risks.

Teams of affected workers, EHS staff, and management representatives then meet to further develop this approach. With the RLBMS and its derived procedures identified and tasks isolated, the workers then take the lead in communicating to management how these tasks should be performed to reduce work‐related risks. For the more commonly performed activities, primarily as RL1 and RL2 tasks with some RL3 examples mixed in, the teamwork of EHS staff and workers can be shown in the aligning of hazard‐to‐control designations for tasks and assigned RLs based on the depth and integrity of supporting data. Management involvement in this process is best optimized when it is limited to assuring final product quality and understanding the needs and expectations of their workers on a first‐hand basis. Once agreements for management support and dedication of resources are reached, the next steps should be the documentation of the approach, training, and procedural requirements to maintain this system over time. Risk communication and knowledge building СКАЧАТЬ