By Heidi Croot
By its very nature—few staff, long hours, multi-tasking—small business is hard-wired to be a model of efficiency: embrace what’s vital, discard what’s not. The down side is when health and safety compliance is treated as one of the dispensable items. Here are some ways small business can remain true to its nature and still meet its legal and moral obligations. The secret is to keep things simple and informal.
Unmask the Myth and Meet Your Legal Obligations
True or false: MOL inspectors don’t have time for small business—they have bigger fish to fry.
False. The MOL has more boots on the ground than ever, and inspectors are focused on small businesses—which comprise 90 per cent of Ontario firms and one-third of its workforce—as a “primary target.” No matter how small you are, you are held accountable for observing the minimum standard under the Health & Safety Act. You must:
Quick, Bite-sized Hits That Make a Difference
Be true to what you are. As a small business, it makes sense for you to keep your health and safety processes simple and informal. Management walkabouts, quickie staff meetings, a handwritten memo to file — these strategies count when inspectors ask if you’ve been meeting your legal obligations.
Here are other effective, yet uncomplicated shortcuts for communicating with staff:
What Does an Accident REALLY Cost?
WorkSafeBC has posted a brilliant, easy-to-use tool that allows you to calculate the true cost of an injury or incident. Two scenarios relate to the service sector—a housekeeper with a back sprain, and a cashier traumatized by an armed robber—but you can use the calculator to address other issues. Check it out and become a believer.
Go to www.healthandsafetycentre.org, click on “Safety at Work,” find “Resources,” and click on “Safety Calculator.”
Tap the Wisdom of Your Staff
Think of it as iceberg theory. A talented ergonomist, a modern workstation design…these are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding effective solutions for workers at risk of sprains and strains. The real breakthrough will come when you perform these three steps:
a) observe staff in motion;
b) inquire what it feels like to perform different tasks;
c) ask a powerful question: “What do you think will help?”
Staff know the answer, but might not share it unless you ask. What could be more low-cost than that? It’s a myth that supervisors or ergonomists know more about a worker’s reality than a worker does.
Make your workplace culture work for you. We know that a shortage of skilled technicians has led some vehicle service shops, for example, to overlook the safety shortcuts taken by veteran employees. These employees use their 30-some years of experience to dodge risk, an advantage young recruits don’t have. Try appealing to your valuable older employees to serve as role models for their younger counterparts. Ask them to help prevent an injury or save a life. No-one wants to hurt another worker, particularly someone the same age as their son or daughter.
Make the Most of Free Resources
Call your local high school or college. Give students an opportunity to learn by helping with health and safety tasks, such as collecting WSDS sheets, developing workplace labels, or conducting hazardous materials inventories. Provide guidance and trust in equal measures, and watch them take off. When a small hotel, for example, failed part of its WSIB WorkWell audit, managers wanted an orientation video to help close performance gaps, but lacked the funds to develop a professional one. Solution: they equipped three coop students with guidelines, criteria and a video camera, and set them loose. The students chose to tell the health and safety story by interviewing staff. The resulting video, albeit imperfect, drove the message home in a way that no talking heads from the management team ever could. Thanks, kids!
Put the Cart Behind the Horse
Ask “why” five times. Countless dollars have been siphoned from slim budgets to pay for ergonomic assessments or expensive equipment, when the real cause of sprains and strains might be something as simple as inelegant software. Consider the employer whose data entry clerk complained of shoulder and arm pain. Installing new office furniture didn’t change a thing, but observing the worker in action certainly did. Turns out he was using ancient software that, among other inefficiencies, required him to enter a customer’s contact info twice. Over the course of a day, that’s a lot of needless keyboarding. The employer also realized that much of this individual’s workload could be spread out over the month, instead of crammed in at month end just because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Start by asking—five times if necessary—why? Why is this happening the way it does?
Stick to basics. Managers at a restaurant addressed the risk of slips and falls from water on the kitchen floor by applying a non-slip coating, and putting elaborate policies in place related to non-slip shoes, pylons and mopping. Their light bulb moment occurred when they made the connection between health and safety and preventative maintenance. Doing regular maintenance on floor drains and back flow valves kept floors drier.
Go with the flow. Building a warehouse or moving to a new one? You can save thousands in health and safety costs by mapping the flow of your materials and organizing workers’ activities for maximum safety and efficiency…before you move in. If you’re already established in a warehouse with no hope of reconfiguring the racking or repositioning the lights, there’s still a lot you can do. Make aisles safer by storing temporary offloads in locations that won’t create bottlenecks. Think about your deliveries as though you were an air traffic controller: space and time are your variables, so optimize them. Find needlessly separated activities; for example, position your weigh area close to where you unload and not at the “back” of the warehouse. Bolt down your racking: a small cost to offset an expensive racking collapse. And consider forklift awareness training for your warehouse pedestrians. Is it really that expensive when it can help prevent one of the top causes of warehouse fatalities?
Crunch Your Numbers
Know the cost of doing nothing. Health and safety sometimes fails to earn the respect it deserves because businesses don’t know how to present it as a cost item on the balance sheet. Consider this:
Call a WSIB Small Business Services office or the “Prevention Hotline” (1-800-663-6639 or 416-344-1016) for help. You might even discover yearly incentive money available for your small business. (See plain-English explanations of WSIB programs in the “Prevention” section of www.wsib.ca.)
Freebies from Suppliers
Remember, MSDS sheets are required by law and suppliers must provide them to you (mail, fax or CD ROM).
Call Your Health and Safety Broker
Health and safety is not a competition. If you’re struggling with a health and safety issue, chances are someone else has too. Unlike marketing strategies, solutions that prevent injuries and save lives need to be freely shared. Think of OSSA as your idea broker. We can put you in touch with best practices, research, or ideas from other firms
Excerpted from Safety Mosaic, Volume 9, No. 4, Winter 2006
You should involve the Joint Health & Safety Committee in your purchasing process for safety equipment and supplies.