Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to ensure safe and healthful working conditions for employees by establishing and enforcing standards, and providing training and compliance assistance. OSHA requires employers to provide safe and healthful work for their employees, free of any potential hazards. Of course it is impossible for employers to identify every conceivable hazard in the workplace, but there are five important steps that every employer should take to reduce the chance of injury or illness in the workplace and the likelihood of receiving costly OSHA citations.
1. Conduct a privileged internal audit
One of the most effective ways for an employer to identify and eliminate safety hazards in the workplace is to conduct an internal safety and health audit. While working with a safety and health professional, employers should closely examine every aspect of their workplaces to ensure that they are in full compliance with OSHA standards and best practices.
Employers must be careful in how they go about conducting such audits, however. Generally a written audit report will be created once the audit is complete, highlighting areas where improvement is needed. Should OSHA inspect the worksite, it may demand to see the report and rely upon it as a guide to potential hazards in the workplace. This could essentially result in OSHA using the employer’s attempt to proactively improve safety in the workplace against the employer. OSHA might do this by issuing citations based upon hazards which may have been identified in the report but not yet remedied. Employers can protect their internal audit reports from disclosure to OSHA by working with counsel in conducting their audits. When an employer engages counsel to provide compliance advice, and counsel then engages a safety and health professional to conduct the audit in order to aid counsel in providing such advice, the audit report is protected from disclosure to OSHA by the attorney-client privilege.
2. Effectively communicate with employees
Providing open lines of communication with employees is another essential element of ensuring the safest possible workplace. Employers should actively engage with their employees and encourage them to make suggestions for safety and health improvements. Employees are often the first to identify a potential problem and, having regularly worked in a particular area or with a particular piece of machinery, have insightful suggestions about how the problem can best be resolved.
3. Ensure that safety and health documentation is up-to-date and understood
Depending on the industry, OSHA requires employers to provide a range of written guidance to employees regarding the essentials of safely performing their work. Many employers must record work-related injuries and illnesses. Employers subject to OSHA’s process safety management standard (oil refiners and chemical companies, for example) must create and maintain a host of documents, such as process hazard analyses and compliance audits, and many of these documents must be created or reviewed within established time periods set forth in the standard. All employers must also provide essential safety information to their employees, such as how to evacuate in an emergency.
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Every employer should regularly review its OSHA documentation requirements, which may change from time to time. Recently, for example, OSHA removed several industries from its list of industries required to maintain work-related injury and illness logs, but it also added several industries that have never been subject to this requirement. Having determined the extent of their documentation requirements, employers should review their documents and ensure that they are thorough and up to date. Finally, employers should discuss the documents with the employees that must work with and/or rely upon them and make sure that employees fully comprehend their content and the reason for maintaining them. This helps to ensure employee safety and gives employees another opportunity to provide suggestions and point out information that should be included in the documents that the employer may not be aware of.
4. Provide comprehensive training to employees
OSHA standards include a number of training requirements and often, if a worksite is inspected and citations are issued, failure to effectively train employees on relevant safety and health information will be included among the citations. Employers must provide comprehensive training to employees in a way that employees can fully understand. A simple way to ensure compliance with this requirement is to administer a quiz at the conclusion of the training, requiring employees to demonstrate their comprehension of the information that was relayed to them. Many companies require employees to achieve a high score on such quizzes (e.g., 90–100 percent). If employees are unable to reach the required score on the first try, they should be given the opportunity to be re-trained and take the quiz again. Employers should keep records of all safety and health training provided to employees and should keep quizzes and other related materials on file. Simply being able to provide these documents to OSHA in the event of an inspection will go a long way towards proving that the employer has complied with OSHA’s training requirements.
5. Protect everyone working at the worksite
Employers should make every effort to ensure that ALL of the employees on their worksites are safe — contractors and temporary workers included. Many tragic incidents can be avoided by ensuring that everyone on the worksite is on the same page when it comes to safety. Although this task may sound daunting, it is another essential element of creating a truly safe working environment. Moreover, OSHA has instructed its compliance officers to expand the scope of inspections where temporary workers may have been exposed to a hazard identified by OSHA at a worksite. This instruction led to a 322 percent increase in inspections involving temporary employees in 2014. Only 15 percent of these inspections led to citations being issued to the temporary agencies involved. However, the employers that were using those temp agencies received countless citations for, among other things, increasing the risk of harm for temporary employees by failing to properly train them or provide them with the safety gear that is provided to permanent employees.
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