OSHA’s warning about workplace rewards programs that might encourage employees not to report injuries raises concerns that some good companies may be unfairly caught up in an enforcement action.

Before I begin, let me make clear that no one at FDRsafety buys into incentive programs. We favor more fundamental approaches based on management responsibility, compliance and creating a culture of employees “wanting to be safe.” Having said that, there are a couple of concerns with OSHA’s position, which was outlined in a recent memo.

First, OSHA does not seemed concerned with the historic practice of piece rate for pay. Is there any greater incentive for taking safety shortcuts than making money? What about the thousands of employees who skip some of those nasty safety rules that slow them down? How is it that “incentive programs” are the latest evil?

Before I mention my second issue, I need to state that we are completely supportive of OSHA when employers are using incentive programs as a disincentive to reporting injuries.

The problem comes in when trying to assess not “what,” but “how” and “why.” What if I’m an employer who values his employees, has everything in compliance and I wish to celebrate a period of time with no injuries? Let’s say we have pizza to celebrate the milestone. Will my company be in violation of OSHA’s perception of “incentive programs that discourage employees from reporting their injuries”?

This is another “heads-up” that OSHA continues to aggressively find fault with many traditional safety approaches. Some of their “catches” may be well founded, but our experience suggests that many good employers are unfairly caught up in OSHA’s new interpretations.

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A prospective client asked about the ROI of using lean and safe thinking to build an organizational culture where safety is a value and elimination of waste is part of the company’s DNA.

This is a tough question, as the tools and thinking are different than many processes that allow you to project an ROI ahead of time. What sets lean and safe thinking apart is the granularity of how you see things. Here, seconds count.

Let’s assume we have a two-shift operation with 20 workers on each shift. Each worker produces 400 parts per shift. During a 5S (a lean tool that has 5 steps to identify and eliminate waste), a team finds that workers lose one second and exert extra effort each cycle while reaching for a tool. The team decides to rehang tools for easier accessibility – and save a second in the process. It was also noted that the reach for shorter workers was such that it could lead to an ergonomic injury. The easier reach significantly reduced the ergonomic stressor.

Big deal – right? Well, it is a big deal both for worker health as well as productivity. Here’s why:

• 1 second of wasted time to reach for the tool X 400 = 400 sec = 6.66 min wasted / worker / shift
• 20 workers / shift X 6.66 minutes = 133.2 total minutes wasted per shift
• 2 shifts X 133.2 minutes / shift = 266.4 minutes wasted per day
• 250 working days / year X 266.4 minutes / day = 66,600 minutes wasted per year
• 66,600 min / 60 = 1110 hours wasted per year

Let’s assume the workers make $15 / hour. One second of wasted time cost the company $16,650 in one year – all for one wasted second that benefits no one.

Help your workers, help your company – and ultimately help your customers when you can produce things faster, better, cheaper – and safer.

Preventive maintenance and safety are disciplines not typically seen as closely related, but bridging the two silos can help identify low probability risks with severe injury potential.

A risk assessment of your facility and processes, talking with maintenance workers and supervisors about tasks infrequently / rarely performed, and other means to gain input on jobs not typically reviewed are steps in the right direction.

Once you have identified the tasks and risks, I strongly encourage you to ask preventive maintenance-related questions. Things like:

• If we did better preventive maintenance, would the operation have less frequent unscheduled maintenance? (When unscheduled breakdowns happen in a production bottleneck, it is a short step for employees to ignore lockout or other safety procedures in an effort to get production up and running)
• If we don’t do proper preventive maintenance on a process operation (continuous flow, heat treat, etc), could the result be potentially catastrophic?
• Who is responsible for preventive maintenance, are they properly trained, how often is it done, do maintenance personnel understand the safety risks, etc?
• Do we have standardized preventive maintenance processes and procedures? Is safety part of the work routine?

When we take the broader view of safety integrated with preventive maintenance, we may well see opportunities to improve both uptime and safety. That’s a unique opportunity for HSE to be part of improving productivity while reducing risk in a tangible way. Moreover, much of the work may fall to Engineering or others who have the primary responsibility for preventive maintenance.

Traditional occupational safety is necessary but no longer sufficient in this day and age when we are properly challenged to demonstrate value to the organization. Bust into the silo of preventive or planned maintenance and look for new opportunities to reduce risk.

While appropriate use of lockout/tagout is critical to safe operation, OSHA sometimes has been going too far in ramping up lockout enforcement, as shown in a recent case where a violation was withdrawn.

Companies who have been hit with lockout violations should check to see if they too have been inappropriately cited.

The issue is the definition of the term “setup.” OSHA said in a 2002 bulletin that the lockout/tagout standard applied to the control of hazardous energy “when employees are involved in service or maintenance activities such as constructing, installing, setting up, adjusting, inspecting, modifying, and maintaining or servicing machines or equipment.”

The standard only applies, the bulletin said, when “the unexpected startup, energization, or the release of stored energy could cause injury.”

The problem is that many employers and employees casually use the term “setup” when, in fact, they are performing a tool change that is routine, repetitive and integral to the operation. This type of activity actually falls under OSHA’s established exemption for minor servicing.

OSHA should recognize that many, if not most, tool change tasks require intentional movement of slides, fixtures and devices. Pushing control buttons intentionally to move a machine part is the exact opposite of “unexpected”.

Lockout citation withdrawn

One of our clients recently received a lockout citation from OSHA for what were actually minor servicing activities. But after our report on the setup issue was presented as technical evidence, OSHA withdrew the lockout citation, thus avoiding a costly hearing.

We’re also working with other companies to assess their lockout/tagout procedures. We often employ a methodology recognized by OSHA in the late ‘90s called Task Based Risk Assessment to determine when the “minor servicing” exemption applies. Task Based Risk Assessment is now a part of the ANSI B11 family of general industry safety standards. It is simple and easy to learn, and will allow a proper level of safety with minimal downtime for tool change.

For more information on how to assess which of your activities require lockout and which do not, contact FDRsafety.

As mentioned in a previous post OSHA is warning companies not to structure rewards programs — whether intentionally or not — so that they encourage employees not to report injuries or illnesses.

An example might be offering the chance to enter a prize drawing to all employees not injured in the previous year.

So how can you know if your program is structured properly? The law firm of Ogletree Deakins is offering a webinar “Safety Incentive Programs Under Attack by OSHA — Is Your Plan Vulnerable?”

Participating will be attorneys Melissa A. Bailey and H. Bernard Tisdale III. James McGrew will moderate.

The webinar will be offered Tuesday, May 22, at 2 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

It’s easy for safety professionals to keep their gaze on the trees rather than the forest. There are plenty of pressing daily problems to solve and it becomes easy to push strategic thinking to the back burner.

For those who want to get their eyes back on the forest, a recent online article by Paul J. H. Schoemaker, entitled “6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers,” is helpful. It targets company leaders but is equally applicable for HSE pros. Here are some excerpts:

“We need strategic leaders!” is a pretty constant refrain at every company, large and small. One reason the job is so tough: no one really understands what it entails. It’s hard to be a strategic leader if you don’t know what strategic leaders are supposed to do.

Learn
Here’s what you need to do:
• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you’re off track
• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight

You can test your own strategic aptitude with a survey put together by Decision Strategies International.

In addition to the survey questions, you might consider questions directly impacting our profession:

• While continuing to work on OSHA recordable injuries, are you working on:
o Safety 24-7?
o Exposures that could result in a serious or fatal injury?

• While managing compliance programs, are you thinking about:
o How to pull them together in a system? (see ANSI Z10)
o Creating processes for top management to lead and delegate?

• Are you thinking about how safety can link with:
o Lean manufacturing processes?
o Long term strategies like sustainable growth and corporate social responsibility?

Strategic HSE thinkers will have these – and other strategic — issues forefront in their minds.

A federal appeals court has struck down recordkeeping violations issued by OSHA against a petrochemical construction and maintenance company for allegedly failing to report workplace injuries that in many cases occurred years before the citations were issued.

The ruling goes against a long-time OSHA position that failure to accurately record injuries and illnesses on the OSHA 300 log from years past is a continuing violation and that the OSH Act’s statute of limitations (6 months) does not apply.

In a decision issued Friday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled that the OSHA violations issued against the company exceeded the statute of limitations. The violations were issued in November 2006 against Volks Constructors for allegedly failing to record some workplace injuries between January 2002 and April 2006, according to McDermott Will & Emery, the law firm that represented Volks.

The court’s decision reversed a decision by the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission to uphold the violations.

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A federal appeals court decision has pushed back against what appears to be an attempt by OSHA to expand the definition of a “work-related” injury.

The case involved an OSHA citation against Caterpillar Logistics Services for allegedly failing to record an ergonomic injury on its OSHA log. The employee involved was diagnosed with an elbow condition after working five weeks in the company’s packing department.

However an internal review panel concluded that repetitive motion on the job was not the only cause of the injury and the company decided not to post the injury on its OSHA log.

OSHA said, however, that the injury was work-related and cited the company failing to record the injury. An administrative law judge who upheld OSHA’s determination concluded that “an employee’s work activities do not have to be the cause, but rather a cause of an injury or illness” to be recordable.

The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals, based in Chicago, overturned that determination. The Court criticized the administrative law judge for basing his decision on the sole physician to testify in support of OSHA’s position and ignoring the “strong indications that [his] favored witness got things wrong.” The Court discounted OSHA’s physician’s testimony because he failed to explain why, if the work activities in the packing department contribute to the elbow injury, no other worker in the company’s 10 years of operations had contracted this same condition.

According to an analysis of the case by the EpsteinBeckerGreen law firm “because of the Caterpillar Logistics case, it remains unsettled whether an employee’s job duties must be the cause of an injury or illness or a cause to constitute work-relatedness.”

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OSHA is warning employers to be careful about rewards programs that could unintentionally – or perhaps even intentionally – encourage employees not to report injuries.

In a recent communication, OSHA cited as an example a program in which employers created a prize-drawing for all employees who had not been injured in the previous year. Another example of a bad practice in OSHA’s view is giving a team of employees a bonus if no one from the group was injured in a given period of time.

So what can employers do to reward safety oriented behavior?

Here are examples of activities for which OSHA believes rewards are appropriate:

· Identifying hazards or participating in investigations of injuries, incidents or “near misses”
· Serving on safety and health committees
· Suggesting ways to strengthen safety and health
· Completing a company-wide safety and health training program

OSHA warns that failure to structure rewards programs in an appropriate way could result in violations of rules requiring an employer not to discriminate against an employee who exercises their right to report an injury. An improper rewards program could also lead to violations of recordkeeping rules, OSHA said.

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Dramatic accidents involving long falls or amputations in machines are often what makes headlines when it comes to non-fatal safety issues. But the costliest disabling injuries for industry, at least when it comes to Workers Compensation, involve something much more routine – overexertion.

That’s the conclusion of the2011 Liberty Mutual Safety Index, which found that about 25 percent of total direct workers compensation costs from injuries that kept workers off the job for six days or more stemmed from overexertion, which includes lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, carrying or throwing. That amounted to $12.75 billion in costs of an estimated $50.1 billion total in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available.

Others in the top 10, and their estimated cost:

• Fall on the same level — $7.9 billion
• Fall to lower level — $5.4 billion
• Bodily reaction — $5.3 billion
• Struck by object — $4.6 billion
• Highway incident — $2.2 billion
• Caught in/compressed by — $2 billion
• Struck against object — $2 billion
• Repetitive motion — $2 billion
• Assault violent act — $0.6 billion

The path to reducing these injuries? Skills training of course is helpful. But the truth is that for overexertion and many of the other items on the list, most workers know perfectly well how to act more safely – they just have to want to do it. Safety awareness training can help workers realize just what is at stake when they venture into behavior they know is unsafe.

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