According to the Minister of Labor of Ontario, small businesses represent 95% of the total employers in the province, and, they employ 28% of the Ontario’s workers.
Despite their importance to the overall economy, many small businesses face challenges establishing a health and safety program. Besides all that goes with the everyday running of the company, making sure workers are safe presents additional responsibilities. It can be particularly challenging for small business owners who might lack the specialized knowledge to identify workplace hazards and have limited resources.
Here is how these three phases will help you to establish a good safety program from the scratches.
Phase 1. Conduct the following activities to start knowing the hazards that you workers are facing every day:
1. Create the inventory of the safety aspects of your small business such as lifting heavy objects, working at heights, tools, etc.
2. Conduct a hazards risk assessment of those elements.
3. Introduce Management of Change to control and identify hazards of those changes.
4. Establish the Incident investigation program. It will help you determine factor and causes that contributed to having an incident. Also, it will allow you not to have the same event again by creating action items.
5. Conduct audits to verify if all regulations and actions are effective and implemented.
Phase 2: Establish the Certification of Recognition for small businesses.
The Benefits are.
• Makes a strong public statement about a company’s commitment to protecting the well-being of workers and maintaining a culture of safety on job sites. A win-win for everyone!
• Employers who achieve and maintain COR may be eligible to receive up to 15% in annual incentive.
• Over time, with reduced injuries and lower claim costs, a COR company’s experience-rated WSIB premiums will reflect additional savings.
• Many general contractors require subcontractors to have a recognized safety program in place as a prequalification to bid on projects. COR meets that requirement.
Phase 3: Establish concepts such as lean safety and introduce the OSHAS 18001
An effective health and safety management system can provide benefits to your customers and give you a competitive advantage by:
• Minimising the risks of production delays
• Providing a safe environment to do business
• Demonstrating your commitment to maintaining an adequate health and safety policy
Other benefits make your organization more efficient, able to meet its legal requirements and help to improve staff morale by making the workplace a safer environment to work.
Benefits to the organization include:
• Improving your reputation and increase your opportunities to gain new business
• Minimising risks of downtime through accidents
• Demonstrating your commitment to meet legal obligations
• Possible cost savings from public liability insurance premiums
• Maintaining compliance with statutory requirements
• Providing a robust system to manage and to improve health and safety
• When people look at facility improvement opportunities, they often look at process improvement methodologies, such as Lean Manufacturing. Another thing that is commonly reviewed is facility safety improvements. In many cases, however, they don’t see that using lean manufacturing techniques can often also provide safety improvements.
• Thinking about safety lean manufacturing will allow you to make improvements throughout your facility in a way that will not only reduce waste and increase profitability but also help improve safety at the same time. The following are five examples of how lean can directly enhance safety within your facility.
• According to DesignSafe’s document on, Integrating Safety and Lean Manufacturing
• Safety must not be viewed as a separate activity that is a nonvalue-added effort with objectives contrary to lean concepts. Elimination of waste can also be interpreted as the elimination or minimization of risk that adversely affects wasted human resources and lost time from injuries. Lean imperatives of faster, better, and cheaper must encompass the issue of running safer as well.
