Total Environmental Health and Safety

BOS 3651, Total Environmental Health and Safety Management 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit I Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

5. Apply risk management principles to reduce the impact of workplace hazards. 5.1 Apply the concept of acceptable risk to a workplace scenario.

5.2 Describe how the as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) concept can be used in

determining acceptable levels of risk in an organization.

7. Examine management tools necessary to implement effective safety management systems. 7.1 Analyze a major section of ANSI/ASSP Z10.0-2019 and ANSI/ASSP/ISO 45001-2018.

7.2 Analyze the possible challenges companies may face in implementing ANSI/ASSP Z10.0 -2019

and ANSI/ASSP/ISO 45001-2018.

Course/Unit

Learning Outcomes

Learning Activity

5.1

Unit Lesson

Chapter 25 Unit I Assessment

5.2

Unit Lesson

Chapter 25 Unit I Assessment

7.1

Unit Lesson

Chapter 1 Unit I Assessment

7.2

Unit Lesson

Chapter 1

Unit I Assessment

Required Unit Resources Chapter 1: An Overview of ANSI/ASSP Z10.0-2019 and ANSI/ASSP/ISO 45001-2018

Chapter 25: Achieving Acceptable Risk Levels: The Operational Goal

Unit Lesson

Welcome! While this course will introduce you to the concepts of safety management systems, the “total” in

the course title means that you will also be drawing from the knowledge gained in previous courses to complete the unit assignments and the course project. After completing the course, you should have

increased confidence in applying what you have learned in your educational journey to real-word situations. The term total, in the course title also aligns with an approach to management that you may have heard of in

the past. That approach is Total Quality Management or TQM, and it was introduced into the United States by Dr. Edward Deming who essentially proposed a new, continuous improvement-focused way of managing

quality in organizations. His approach was successful and was implemented with great success by some of

the largest organizations in the world that actually improved on his methods. Many of these organizations also noted that these new quality management tools also could be applied to other di fficult-to-manage issues that

presented themselves in the workplace, including occupational safety and health.

This course will essentially focus on the evolution of safety and health management systems that grew out of

the TQM movement. It also will examine the success experienced by a large number of organizations that have seen a dramatic decrease in injuries and illnesses in the workplace by implementing Occupational

UNIT I STUDY GUIDE

Introduction to Safety Management Systems

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Safety and Health (OSH) programs that align with TQM principles. The course will also allow you to apply

these concepts in your coursework and hopefully provide you with some useful information to improve the safety and health program efforts where you work.

Given the success experienced in many organizations as a result of their safety and health program efforts,

you might wonder what a successful OSH program looks like. What are the characteristics that set one

organization apart from another when it comes to reducing the numbers of illnesses and injuries? Perhaps your answer would include things like compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s

(OSHA) standards, elimination of workplace hazards, or training that addresses all of the safety standard requirements. After all, these are the types of things many organizations focus on when it comes to guiding

their safety and health efforts.

Of course, these are all important factors to consider as compliance with safety standards is useful for

eliminating workplace hazards, and avoiding OSHA citations is always a good thing as well. A compliance- only approach, however, can only take a company so far when it comes to assuring a safe and healthful

workplace. This is largely because many workplace injuries and illnesses are not so much the result of employers’ lack of effort to comply but are more closely tied to the willingness of employees to embrace

workplace safety measures. In essence, employees can and often do sabotage employer safety efforts.

Employees can choose, for instance, to not wear their fall protection or bypass machine guards when management is not looking and sometimes with the approval of their supervisors. Consider a situation where

Ralph, a long-time employee, continues to use an old, dilapidated, unguarded table saw instead of its replacement. He tells his supervisor, “I’ve been using this ol’ saw for 18 years and it has not hurt me yet.”

Rather than fight with Ralph, the supervisor lets him continue to use the old saw knowing that there will likely

be no consequence.

Stories similar to Ralph’s are not all that uncommon in companies that utilize a compliance approach to safety and essentially dictate safety rules and compliance-based solutions to their workers. This is one benefit of the

total safety management approach because a great deal of effort is made to make occupational safety and health a core value of the organization and to affect the organization’s culture. In such an organization, people

do not conduct themselves in a safe manner and follow rules to keep from getting into trouble; rather, they do

so because it is a cultural expectation of the organization, and it would seem odd not to follow the safety rules.

With this said, you may have heard that organizations with a well -developed safety culture are the most

successful, but most of us would be hard-pressed to really define a safety culture. Is it when safety is an inherent value rather than a simple priority? Is it when management demonstrates a great deal of commitment

to safety or empowers employees? Is it when everyone in an organization is involved with its safety and

health efforts? Maybe it is all of these things. On the other hand, it may be some combination of these things. One thing that is clear, however, is that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what it means for an organization to have

a safety culture. Another thing is certain. It does not occur on its own.

Organizations with successful accident prevention programs work hard to get there. One of the factors these

organizations seem to have in common is that they have a safety management process that guides them in their efforts. Another characteristic is that the process evolves. That is, once a problem is solved, the

organization is proactive in looking for other ways to prevent the incident from happening ag ain. Is this not the same type of system that organizations use to manage their business processes? Yes, this is key. Successful

OSH programs are managed in much the same way as other business processes. There are at least two advantages to this. First, is that the language of the system is already familiar to the non-safety individuals in

the organization, so they are more willing to adopt it. Second, it seems to work.

If you research safety management standards, you will find that there is an abundance. The British National

Standards Institute publishes the Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001 and British Standard (BS) 8800; the International Labor Organization (ILO) publishes ILO -OSH 2001. This course

will introduce you to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Industrial Hygiene

Association’s (AIHA) ANSI/AIHA Z10.0-2019, American National Standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems (Z10 for short). Why focus on this standard as opposed to the others? Z10 was

developed to include and build on many of the best management practices from the other available standards (Manuele, 2020). Even if your organization already uses one of the other standards, you will find that Z10 is

compatible and can add value.

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The course is not designed to get you to use Z10 exclusively but to help you recognize the characteristics of a

good safety management system and how such a management system can be used to develop or improve an OSH program. Nearly all safety management systems contain similar elements, for example, management

leadership, employee participation, hazard analysis, risk assessment, incident investigation, and audits. Even OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) has most of these elements (OSHA, n.d.).

So, why not just use VPP? OSHA’s VPP program was developed in the 1980s to recognize the safety efforts of high-performing organizations. It was not developed as a safety management standard, although, over the

years, it has become a de facto standard of sorts. VPP has been criticized lately for not being effective. Some organizations that have maintained VPP Star status for years are still experiencing serious accidents and,

occasionally, even fatalities.

One of the things that sets Z10 apart from

VPP and many of the published standards is its focus on continuous improvement—

specifically, the use of Deming’s Plan-Do- Check-Act (PDCA) cycle throughout the

standard. Later in the course, we will spend

time reviewing the PDCA concepts and practice applying them. One of the pitfalls of

using VPP or any standard is the temptation to reach the end, full compliance with the

standard and then reduce efforts. Z10

recognizes that the process is never complete and drives organizations to

continuous improvement.

Z10 also focuses on assessing workplace hazards in terms of risk rather than

standards compliance. In an ideal world, we

would be able to reduce workplace risk to zero, but the very nature of risk as an

expression of probability makes this impossible. As discussed by Manuele (2020),

one of the most important management tasks related to workplace safety is the defining of

acceptable risk. There is no one-size-fits-all

definition. Each organization will have different constraints related to its own

processes and finances, and finances do play an important role in defining acceptable risk. If an organization has an effective safety management

system, however, the safety culture can help the organization reach a consensus. We will be referring back to

risk and risk management frequently as we learn more about Z10.

Throughout the course, we will be looking deeper into the process elements of Z10 and using them to evaluate OSH programs where you work or used to work. The course project will be a report to management

on the status of the safety program, with recommendations and timelines to correct deficiencies and put the organization on the path to a world-class OSH program.

The ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable) principle is

a term used in the OSH field. (Legg, 2007)

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References

Legg, D. W. (2007, June 28). Carrot diagram [Image]. Wikimedia Commons.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carrot_Diagram.jpg

Manuele, F. A. (2020). Advanced safety management: Focusing on Z10.0, 45001, and serious injury

prevention (3rd ed.). Wiley. https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781119605409

Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (n.d.). Voluntary protection programs. United States Department of Labor. http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/vpp/index.html