Reduce Workplace Risk with Job Hazard Analysis Software

Jobsites are potential hotbeds for injury, illness and other accidents if proper safety standards are not identified and enforced. That’s where a job hazard analysis comes in. This technique focuses on job tasks to identify hazards associated with them before they have a chance to occur. The worker, the tasks, the tools and the work environment are all evaluated for potential risk.

The jobs most in need of this extra attention are typically the ones for which it can be the most tedious and complicated to perform: jobs that are complex enough that they require written instructions, jobs that are new and unfamiliar to your workplace or jobs in which one single instance of human error can lead to serious harm or injury. A job hazard analysis software can be the perfect solution to the inefficiencies and difficulties of the process. By utilizing a program, you’ll find your safety and risk management processes to be more organized, effective and thorough.

Using Job Hazard Analysis Software in Your JHA

The effectiveness of a JHA begins with a company’s dedication to the safety and health of the employees and workplaces. If the process is not undertaken seriously, hazards will not be properly identified and subsequently addressed. To that end, a software equipped to help you coordinate the analysis will ensure your JHA runs much more smoothly.

Involving Employees in the Analysis

An essential aspect of a successful JHA is the employees that work in the jobsite on a daily basis. They are the people actually performing the tasks and will have valuable knowledge to offer the process regarding potential hazards, close calls on the job, the potential cost of human error, which tasks our simple and complex and whether or not they’ve been advised on safety regulations and standards. Involving them also helps them to “buy in” to the process so to speak, helping them help you build a safer workplace for everyone.

Effectively conducting this preliminary review and involving all of your employees can easily become a discordant process, though. You need to learn what can go wrong when completing job tasks, how likely a hazard is to happen, what can cause a hazard to occur and what the consequences could be. Some of this is straightforward information, but much of the responses to these questions are subjective, and your assessment and analysis of hazards must be able to deal with that.

Job hazard analysis software makes it easy to engage your employees and collect the data they submit regarding potential hazards and the risk of exposure. This type of software is designed to give you versatility in your question creation so you are able to get the most helpful data for proper analysis. Software is also able to more easily handle a large assortment of employee assessments of workplace hazards and keep the results well-organized.

Identifying Workplace Hazards

To make your job hazard analysis useful, answers to the questions asked of those involved need to be documented in a consistent manner. You need to have a standardized means of assessing a hazard’s environment, potential for exposure to the hazard, possible triggers, the consequences or outcomes to exposure and any other contributing factors. Only by taking the time to make sure all answers are comparable will you be able to use to cumulative data to identify a hazard and take steps to address it.

By taking advantage of job hazard analysis software and the unique features it offers to the process, you’ll be able to apply uniformity to all assessments in all areas of your company’s safety and risk management program. Whether you are qualitatively or quantitatively job safety to identify and prioritize hazards, your most valuable asset is an established, well-oiled method of analysis that will make the process progress with ease.

Ordering and Prioritizing Hazards

Once you have identified the job hazards you workplace is at risk of, the next stage of a JHA involves listing, ranking and prioritizing them. It’s important to deal with the hazards with the most unacceptable risks first. That’s where the data reporting and analysis of a software program can be the most vital to your commitment to risk reduction.

Not only do you need to have the ability to analyze data from your most recent assessments strategically, but a JHA usually calls for a more comprehensive historical review of injuries, accidents, close calls and long-term risk management efforts. Without the help of a digital archive capable of collating all of this information, determining which hazards pose the greatest threat can become time-consuming.

You may even find that after identifying existing hazards in the first round of qualitative analysis that it’s necessary to perform a quantitative analysis that utilizes your risk experts in order to properly itemize your hazards and narrow in on the greatest threats to safety. This type of complex assessment benefits from not only experts in your organization that know how to appropriately quantify the value of assets but a job hazard analysis software that is flexible enough to create these assessments and report on the responses.

Reducing and Eliminating Hazards

All the effort you’ve put into working with your employees to identify and prioritize hazards won’t actually create a safe workplace if you fail to take the necessary steps to reduce or eliminate the risk these hazards pose. Typically the most effective hazard controls are those that physically change a machine or work environment to prevent exposure to the hazard in the first place. In the absence of these kinds of engineering controls, administrative controls that seek to change the way employees perform their jobs can be applicable. The best way to know what and how a hazard control should be implemented is to involve the employees performing the job, though.

Any recommendations should be reviewed with all of your employees who are familiar with the job and its hazards, and their responses should be considered carefully. Some hazard controls may ultimately be unreasonable to move forward with. At this juncture, job hazard analysis software can be used to lay out the proposed controls and question your experts on their impressions of them, their effectiveness, their predicted outcomes and how much they will actually be able to reduce risk in the long-term.

Create a Safer Workplace With ComplianceBridge

A commitment to safety from the get-go is one of the smartest things you can do for your company. The findings of a job hazard analysis will help you to reduce worker injuries and illnesses, develop safer and more effective methods for completing job tasks, lower workers’ compensation costs and ultimately, result in a more productive jobsite. ComplianceBridge is dedicated to helping you see the benefits of proper safety management and improved compliance.

ComplianceBridge from ComplianceBridge offers a suite of solutions designed to aid you every step of the way from assessing hazards to implementing new safety protocols. Build assessments with flexibility using a variety of question sets including our unique risk rating. Questions can be weighted for increased accuracy, and conditional follow-up questions can be added for more exhaustive results. Work with others to create assessments and easily distribute them to the chosen recipients individually, by department or by distribution list. Assessments can even have sub-assignments for different employees within the workplace.

Review results in real-time – down to individual questions – and identify and prioritize your hazards. ComplianceBridge gives you tremendous control over your data, and you can also export it for use in other programs. With ComplianceBridge Intelligent Forms, you can create hazard worksheets that meet state and federal OSHA standards. With a variety of formatting options, you can create and share important information – and collect it with dynamic form fields.

When it’s time to introduce or modify safety procedures and policies according to your JHA findings, ComplianceBridge Policy and Procedure Management allows you to collaboratively write documents and gain approval before disseminating them to the impacted workers. Quizzes will test comprehension of new material and increase up-take. All steps of the process from analysis to policy implementation are meticulously tracked and saved for your records.

Be better equipped to prevent workplace injuries and illnesses with job hazard analysis software. Request a demo today to learn how ComplianceBridge can bring peace of mind and ensure safe working conditions.