Safety management systems (SMS) are instituted so that a workplace maintains a high level of safety, preventing accidents and injuries by training beforehand in ways to avoid them. Every employee of an organization should be involved in an SMS including management employees. There should be regular training and monitoring. An SMS is a comprehensive method of avoiding accidents and injuries, and maintaining a safe work environment.
With a safety management system (SMS), the main objective is to have every employee involved from the CEO down to the part-time window washer. Employees can be resources of safety management if the management team involves them and makes them feel as if they are integral to the success of the SMS. Some employees have frontline experience that is useful in an SMS. However, they probably will not be enthusiastic about it unless the organization mandates and encourages active employee involvement. The most powerful motivation is accident prevention (Columbia Southern University, p. 2). Management must provide education and training, and encourage and motivate employees to become involved in their own safety and the safety of others in the workplace.
Training and accountability are important in any SMS. Through training, employees become aware of what causes accidents and how they can be prevented. It also reveals the causes of accidents and injuries and lets employees understand their responsibility in preventing them. “Safety training is of vital importance to both management and the workforce as it forms an important safety knowledge base on which to build a comprehensive safety management system” (McKinnon, 2017, p. 113). Safety training should be ongoing and all employees should be held accountable for safety in the workplace.
Several types of safety training exist but three main types are induction or orientation training, refresher training and other specific types such as CPR or first aid training. Induction or orientation training is for new employees so that they become familiar with the workplace, its risks and its safety policies. Refresher training is follow up training that occurs on a regular basis such as yearly. However, safety training should take place more often than once per year. That means there are specific areas related to safety in which employees can be trained such as CPR or first aid that fits nicely into an SMS. Other types of specific safety training areas include risk management, ergonomics and hazard identification (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 114-115).
One way to monitor the success of an SMS is to carry out planned job observations. Job Safe Practices (JSPs) are protocols for each position held by employees at a jobsite and should be made available to all employees. Employees should be trained in JSPs and should be supervised until they can follow the procedure without leaving any of the steps out of the procedure. Planned job observations can be scheduled on a regular basis to ensure that employees are following JSPs. Planned job observations can also be impromptu, and can be considered part of the SMS (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 120-121). Another type of SMS monitoring is safety inspections. These are mainly to find unsafe conditions and to correct them. They should be carried out on a regular basis also.
Evaluation of an SMS takes place through audits. SMS audits are done to ensure that all parts of the SMS are being carried out. They can be formal internal audits or they can be informal, impromptu audits. Audits can also be carried out by a third party outside the organization such as OSHA or a contracted auditing company. All aspects of the SMS are considered during audits (McKinnon, 2017, pp. 123-124).
All employees should be encouraged to report workplace situations that are approaching or becoming hazards such as slippery conditions in winter weather, health concerns such as mold in the break room, and SMS program shortcomings such as an area of the workplace that does not get scrutiny such as employee restrooms or breakrooms. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) (2016) explains that workers are the best people to report such things because they may see situations about which management is unaware (OSHA, 2016). Other types of information that should be reported include unsafe conditions, close calls, near misses, and actual incidents.
Types of information that should be included on a suggestion form are the time, date, and location of an incident, who is involved in the incident, and the type of incident such as whether it is a potential hazard, a health hazard or an
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