Establishing a safety and health program in your workplace is one of the most effective ways of protecting your most valuable asset: your workers. Losing workers to injury or illness, even for a short time, can cause significant disruption and cost—to you as well as the workers and their families. It can also damage workplace morale, productivity, turnover, and reputation.
Safety and health programs foster a proactive approach to “finding and fixing” workplace hazards before they can cause injury or illness. Rather than reacting to an incident, management and workers collaborate to identify and solve issues before they occur. This collaboration builds trust, enhances communication, and often leads to other business improvements.
Management provides the leadership, vision, and resources needed to implement an effective safety and health program. Management leadership means that business owners, managers, and supervisors:
- Communicate your commitment to a safety and health program
- Define program goals
- Allocate resources
- Expect performance
OSHA recommends beginning with a basic program with simple goals and grow from there. If you focus on achieving goals, monitoring performance and evaluating outcomes, your workplace can progress along the path to higher levels of safety and health achievement.
Upcoming OSHA #7500 Introduction to Safety and Health Management Classes