Obtaining results is important when reinforcing the value of a safety committee to company employees, says Kielly MacKenzie, safety representative program personnel development coordinator at Boise Cascade's St. Helens, Ore., facility. This is why he encourages other workers to follow his safety committee's footsteps by allowing them to see the active steps the committee has made in improving safety.
Airborne sawdust was a problem before Boise Cascade's safety committee was implemented in October 2005. "The company would take a recordable incident of airborne sawdust exposure at least once every 2 years," MacKenzie says.
Once the safety committee started to secure its role as a safety watchdog and train its representatives in hazard identification, one of the committee's safety representatives started to look for the root cause of the airborne sawdust problem. After talking to employees who worked with the woodchips where the sawdust originated, the safety representative discovered the sawdust became airborne as the woodchips were transferred from one belt to another. The problem was corrected immediately.
"We use this example when talking to other employees in the mill and say this just one of the ways our program can be of help," he says.
As at Boise Cascade, many other employers are looking to invest in safety committees as a means to help management provide a safe workplace for employees in addition to improving the company's bottom line. Wayne Vanderhoof, an independent safety consultant, wrote in Occupational Hazards in 2002 that "by having a well-trained, organized and energized safety committee, safety in the workplace can be kept in the forefront of the minds of workers and management and be considered as much a core value as production and quality."
Knowing the value of a safety committee can be beneficial when starting one. But many safety committees falter when it comes to following through on their safety vision. A key reason is that the participants on the safety committee are not provided with a clear understanding of what is expected from them as participants and the committee as a whole when it comes to preventing accidents and injuries in the workplace.
Safety committees are what Dan Miller - an organizational development consultant who has worked with hundreds of safety committees for the past 36 years - calls the "main artery of an organization." Miller, though, says safety committees have developed a bad rap because some employees view them as just another tedious safety assignment.
"Most people see safety committees as a pain in the butt, another thing to do to get OSHA off their backs," Miller explains.
Walking the Talk
Miller emphasizes that to get a good, effective safety committee off the ground, the basic requirements of having a safety committee &endash; deciding on the number of members, tracking meeting minutes, creating a hazardous identification process, etc. - while important, are not as essential as figuring out how a group of people (union or non-union) will work well together.
"In an effective safety committee, people talk to each other, communicate their expectations, goals or whatever else they have in mind," Miller says.
Miller drilled this concept into Boise Cascade's upper management when the company called on him after seeing him give a presentation at a safety conference. For an entire day, Miller worked on deconstructing and reconstructing a new safety vision for Boise Cascade, while solving any past issues that didn't allow the safety committee to flow smoothly.
MacKenzie says that talking to Miller and understanding his stance made him see the importance of interpersonal communication between company management and employees.
"He (Miller) has been instrumental on how to deal with employees who are disgruntled about something," MacKenzie says. "He gave us guidelines on what to look for and how we should interact with employees."
When instructing companies on improving safety committee effectiveness, one of the notions Miller emphasizes is that it is important for safety committee members to practice what they preach.
This is one of the messages MacKenzie takes to heart. The sawdust example, MacKenzie says, is one of many that goes on in the company and shows that the safety representatives are on the ball when it comes to watching out for hazards.
"Safety representatives are and should be seen as teachers, mentors," he says. "We want to show we are the communication link between employees, the safety department and management."
Source: EHStoday.com
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