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Prevention or Due Diligence what creates a safety culture? How can one best define workplace safety culture for an organization? Workplace safety culture starts with the senior management’s commitment, from which flows the staff accountability. All of this is tied up tight through strong systems and processes. Technology can be very helpful in making the systems and processes easy and effective, while keeping your program alive. In fact, use of technology can make the whole workplace operate efficiently with improved productivity. Technology is the way forward today, and often it is companies who leverage the strengths of technology that end up staying on top of everything. “There are many technological advancements in occupational health & safety. Companies need to choose the options that best fit their business strategy and safety requirements”. Sabesh Kanagaretnam, P.Eng, CEO, 4S Consulting.
Protection vs. Prevention – An Overview Due diligence is about making sure you have done everything ‘reasonable’ under the circumstances to mitigate risks to ‘protect’ your workers. Protection of your workers is the major focus of due diligence. That’s also what the Occupational Health & Safety act requires. However, the big question you must ask yourself at this stage is how good is ‘reasonable’ for building a safety culture? The answer is ‘not good enough’ on most occasions since an organization with a sustainable safety culture is expected to go beyond ‘reasonable’. This brings us to the concept of ‘prevention’. If you go beyond reasonable, you are likely working on ‘prevention’ rather than ‘cure’ for your workers. Prevention is about not having an adverse thing happen at your workplace. Prevention and due diligence are very close concepts, but have a totally different meaning. They are like chalk and cheese. They look the same, yet, they are they are so different from each other, especially from a
Prevention or protection, what are you looking for?
point of view of building a safety culture. Let’s now see which of the two helps in building a safety culture. When you eliminate or remove a hazard, you prevent it from causing any future damage at your workplace. On the other hand, protecting your workers by providing them with personal protective equipment (PPE) is the last and the least effective, reliable, and sustainable step in the hierarchy of controls. That clearly says it all as far as what you need to do as an organization to have the most effective, reliable, and sustainable safety program. Due diligence is the minimum you can do, which is reasonable to protect your workers’ health and safety. However, is ‘reasonable’ enough to help you build a safety culture? The answer is no. It’s crucial for you to note that prevention works at a level well beyond what is reasonable in the given circumstances.
4S Consul�ng Services Inc. – Awareness to safety excellence! 80+ Online Trainings | Mul�ple Languages (Including Mandarin ) | Training Matrix Reports | Track Key Ac�on Items. Web: www.4sconsult.com Tel: (905) 532-1488 Email: info@4sconsult.com
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Markham VOICE Winter 2020
CPO-approved training provider for JHSC (part 1 & 2) | Working at Heights | JHSC & WAH Refresher. WSIB-approved provider for Health & Safety Excellence Program. A way for Markham businesses to earn rebates.
