Swine Flu and Pandemic Preparedness in the Workplace - Part I

With the spread of Swine Flu, a workplace must think of keeping the workplace as safe as possible, both for the employees health and to maintain the day-to-day viability of the business.

Note: As of this writing, the World Health Organization has not labeled the Swine Flu as a pandemic. However, this is the time to make sure your business continuity plan is up to date to include the possibility of a pandemic.

In a pandemic, high rates of illness and worker absence are expected. Past pandemics have spread globally in two and sometimes three waves. Not all parts of the world or of a single country are expected to be severely affected at the same time. Social and economic disruptions could be temporary, but may be amplified in today’s closely interrelated and interdependent systems of trade and commerce.

In a worst-case scenario, “business as usual” may be severely crippled or even cease. Areas with a high incidence of illness may be quarantined. Health officials may have to restrict travel. Borders to certain countries including the US may be closed for a period of time. Given that, it is imperative to take measures to keep your employees healthy, and to have a business emergency plan in place.

Keeping Employees Safe

According to the Centers for Disease Control, these good health practices will significantly slow down the spread of germs within the workplace.

Avoid close contact – Encourage your workers to avoid close contact with people who are sick. When employees are are sick, they should keep their distance from others to protect them from getting sick too. The CDC offers a number of materials to share with your workers here: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/workplace/

Stay home when sick - If possible, encourage workers to stay home when sick. If there is an outbreak in your community, you may want to send workers home who display flu symptoms, or are in close contact with family members with symptoms. Provide appropriate disposable face masks where needed.

Clean hands – Encourage workers to wash their hands often to help diminish the spread of germs. Alcohol-based gel or foam hand sanitizers also work well to destroy viruses and bacteria. Encourage workers to wear disposable gloves where appropriate.

Allow extra time to clean and disinfect between shifts – Cleaning is more important now than ever. Allow your employees extra time to clean work areas between shifts. Provide proper disinfectants and disposable gloves. Have workers disinfect work surfaces, and communal tools before the next shift arrives.

Communicate prevention information with your employees - Anticipate employee fear and anxiety, rumors and misinformation and plan communications accordingly. Develop and disseminate programs and materials covering pandemic fundamentals (e.g. signs and symptoms of influenza, modes of transmission), personal and family protection and response strategies (e.g. hand hygiene, coughing/sneezing etiquette, contingency plans). Ensure that communications are culturally and linguistically appropriate. Provide information for the at-home care of ill employees and family members.

Communicate business policy information - Disseminate information to employees about your pandemic preparedness and response plan. Develop effective means (ie. hotlines, dedicated websites) for communicating pandemic status and actions to employees, in a consistent and timely way, including redundancies in the emergency contact system. If you have a liberal leave policy as part of your pandemic plan (consider one if you don't), communicate the situations it would go into effect, and end.

In Part II, I'll talk about maintaining business continuity, and a pandemic plan. For those who don't want to wait, check here for other information: http://healthyamericans.org/reports/flu/brochures/FluBrochure.pdf

Remember

International Workers' Memorial Day - an annual day of remembrance for workers killed, disabled, injured or made unwell by their work, takes place around the world today (April 28th).

Worldwide, more than a million workers die each year due to job injuries and illnesses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the United States alone, 5,657 workers were killed by traumatic injuries in 2007 (most recent statistics). That's over 15 worker deaths per day. Another estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases. An additional 4 million workers were injured on the job in the US in 2007.

Who is Responsible for Safety?

There are two causes of accidents: unsafe conditions and unsafe acts. A couple of posts last week dealt with unsafe conditions that made the news. Nine out of ten accidents are the result of unsafe acts, though not always by the person immediately involved in the mishap. In fact, it could be said that those news worthy accidents from last week's posts were the result of unsafe acts on the part of management.

Today, however, we'll deal with a more common occurrence - unsafe acts by employees.

When it comes right down to it, the employee is ultimately responsible for their own safety. Why then, do employees make the choice to do unsafe acts? What could employees perceive as more important than personal safety? Don't they realize that one unsafe act could change their and their family's lives forever?

Are there things we as employers, managers, and supervisors do to negatively affect an employee's ability to chose to do tasks safely? How can employers make sure employees embrace ownership for their own safety? Here are a dozen suggestions:

1) Place the responsibility for safety where it belongs: Make sure employee know they are charged with the responsibility for doing their job safely, and that you will completely back them up on that choice. Give them the ability to say “no” to unsafe acts without fear for their job.

2) Give them the training necessary to recognize hazards: Show them specific things - like how to determine if a sling is worn beyond the safe point (colored threads). Reinforce that training often. Training once or twice a year just isn't effective. Explain the hazards of the job, and the price of distraction.

3) Start safety from day one: Most new employees are told about benefits, employee manuals, etc. their first day. Perhaps they are also given a bit of safety training in among all of that. Consider spending the first day or two on the line reinforcing that safety training instead of putting them directly on the job. Show them where to go in an emergency. Make sure they can safety operate a crane and properly lift and move objects. Teach them which PPE to use and how properly wear and maintain it. Make sure they know what is expected of them as far as safe behaviors before any other training. Training at this stage needs to be more than expecting them to pick it up by watching their fellow employees.

4) Talk about safety every day: Safety is a daily responsibility. Reinforce that importance on a daily basis. Take a few minutes at the beginning of each shift to discuss a safety point. Ask what hazards each employee encounters, and listen to the concerns. Investigate those concerns in a timely manner.

5) Involve and engage: Don't just talk to employees. Involve them in the safety process. Teach them to report hazards like unlabeled containers, or near misses. Involve them in the job safety analysis so they learn to use proper judgment. Engage employees in the discussion. Ask questions. Implement employee suggestions where appropriate and give proper credit. Show an expectation that employees are expected to not only report hazards, but to fix the hazards where appropriate.

6) Praise safe behavior: If you expect your employees to respond positively to safety, you have to respond positively to their efforts. When you see them doing something safely tell them how much you appreciate their efforts. No, I'm not talking incentives. I'm talking about a much more personal approach.

Consider having someone from upper management spend a few minutes talking about safety, or walking the floor praising and encouraging proper behavior daily. It needs to be more than just the safety department. It would be preferable to have different people within the upper management structure doing this over the course of the week, or month. Something that simple goes a long way to showing that this is a team effort, and the employee is a vital part of that chain.

7) Make sure everyone walks the walk: Talking about safety does no good if supervisors and managers don't follow their own advice. It's easy to get caught up in production demands. Make sure you aren't sacrificing safety (or giving that perception). If employees feel you are only giving lip service to safety, they won't take safety seriously either.

8) Track unsafe acts and near misses: This information can tell you where problems are occurring before they become accidents. This information can also tell you the effectiveness of your training program. Track employee movement within different areas: If you find an area where employees transfer out, there is a higher incident level, or higher than average turn-over in employment, you may want to check to make sure safety procedures are being given the same priority as production.

9) Investigate near misses with the same priority as accidents: A root cause analysis needs to be done for all near misses. Even when determining employee action find out why the employee felt it necessary to do it the way they did. Did the employee properly understand the procedure? Was it distraction from issues at home? Did the employee feel the need to short-cut? Was it feeling of “it won't happen to me”? Find out why, so you can properly deal with these issues before they become accidents.

10) Keep it clean: Give employees time at the end of every shift to clean up for the next shift. Teach housekeeping as a way to stay safe. Make sure there are easily reachable places for tools. Teach them to promptly return items to their proper place. Obtain equipment that makes housekeeping easier – from enough brooms and mops, to trash bags, to retractable hose reels. Have maintenance issues fixed as quickly as possible.

11) Mix it up: Find multiple ways to encourage safe behavior every day. A number of plants now have TV type monitors on the plant floor showing the news, stocks, menus, etc. There is no reason not to use that as a medium to get the safety message out. Do in-house safety “commercials” using employees as volunteer actors. Have safety contests – perhaps even something that can be shown off at a family day. Use your imagination.

12) Hold employees accountable: Show you mean what you preach. Make sure you have disciplinary measures written into your employee handbook with a well documented procedure for failure to follow rules. If you have someone that just refuses to follow safe procedures, do them and yourself a favor by replacing them. One or two people on a line like that, will ruin your efforts if you allow the behavior to continue. If you are a union shop work with your representative to create appropriate accountability procedures. The same goes for a supervisor or line leads - if they insist and encourage unsafe acts as the price for meeting production demands, you need to find someone capable of supervising correctly.

This video is one of the best examples of the cost of unsafe acts: http://www.harsco.com/about/video/safety/index.html If you would like a copy of this video, contact please email Wendy Witmyer at Harsco for details: wwitmyer@harsco.com


As always, I welcome comments and suggestions.

OHSA may (finally) get teeth.

From: the Las Vegas Sun

WASHINGTON -- House Democrats today introduced a sweeping bill to beef up worker protections laws under the Occupational Safety and Health Act that lawmakers believe have been too lax...The Protecting America’s Workers Act would stiffen fines for violations of workplace safety law and create a new felony category for criminal violations....read more here.

There are many workplaces that are safety conscious, who treat their employees as assets. However, as noted recently, there are also companies with a flagrant disregard of worker's safety and treat their workers as expendable. Unfortunately, those are the companies that caused OSHA to need the felony charge teeth proposed within this bill.

While I don't think that OSHA should be only a regulatory agency, I do believe that gross, and willful negligence of workplace safety leading to the death of a worker should carry the force of a felony charge. I also believe that the investigation should include the decision makers within the company instead of merely the managers who are forced to carry out out those decisions.

Another company with blinders on....

From: http://www.wvgazette.com, in reference to the Bayer CropScience Institute Plant explosion in Institute, WV last summer.

INSTITUTE, W.Va. -- Bypassing important safety systems "became the norm" in a Bayer CropScience Institute plant chemical-making unit that blew up and killed two workers last August, federal investigators said Thursday.

"This could have been going on for years," said John Bresland, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

Bresland said the explosion and fire in Bayer's Methomyl-Larvin unit was "certainly avoidable" if the company had followed proper and accepted safety practices.

"The explosion at Bayer was a very serious and tragic event that could have had additional grave consequences," Bresland said, reading from a prepared statement.

Bresland and his investigators blamed "significant lapses" in plant safety systems for the explosion. The blast came close to damaging a nearly methyl isocyanate tank "the results of which might have been catastrophic for workers, responders and the public," Bresland said....read more here.

U.S. Attorney Charles T. Miller stated his office was going to look into the explosion, after Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper referred the matter to prosecutors. One has to wonder if this will play out to the same conclusion, as did the Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Co. (See Monday's post.)

Reading through the list of safety violations that look to have taken place over years, a few things stand out - inadequately trained employees, routine 12- and 18-hour work days, and the practice of consistently bypassing safety devices.

It all seems to have been done in the name of increased productivity. While I realize that production is what pays the bills in a company, this kind of tunnel vision to the exclusion of safety isn't productive. An effective safety culture can produce measurable increases in productivity according to operational priorities without the risks.

As always comments are welcome.

Training Thoughts

From: The Las Vegas Sun

Washington — Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said Tuesday that the top priorities of her department are hiring investigators and enforcing regulations on worker safety and fair pay.

The previous administration had neglected those issues, Solis said in one of her first appearances on Capitol Hill.

Solis said the focus on the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration as well as its Wage and Hour Division is especially important now. Federal recovery funding is launching construction projects that will need oversight to protect workers.... Read more here.

Whether you feel OSHA should make hiring investigators and enforcing regulations a priority or not, the fact remains that approximately 100 employees per week die in the course of their jobs.

The stimulus projects will result in hiring employees, some of whom have transitioned from other fields. A company is mandated
to furnish employees "a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees".

Unfortunately many workplaces are inherently dangerous. If the hazards can not be engineered out they must be controlled. Part of the control involves hazard recognition and training. Employees need to learn to properly wear PPE. They also need to be trained to recognize the dangers of the workplace, and how to avoid those dangers. This training needs to be done both initially and also constantly throughout the year.

If a company truly believes, and just as importantly, shows that safety is a very important part of the job, so to will the employees.

Fire Safety in the Workplace

As far as possible, a company should take proactive approaches to prevent fire. An active, committed safety committee is one of the foundations for this approach. Extensive training, both through formal methods, and informal tool time talks, not only in fire safety, but also in proper equipment use are the keys. Diligence in separating materials and processes which could cause ignition is an effective approach. Proper hot-work methods, and permits are necessary measures to minimize fire hazards. Limit switches, detector switches, and alarms for both building systems and individual machine areas are all proactive measures. Safety department sign-off for any adjustment or reuse of the area can detect and minimize potential fire hazards. Consistent safety and 5S audits can catch such issues as potential electrical hazards, ventilation hazards, housekeeping problems, and other potential problems that could cause fire hazards. Proper security must be put in place, to prevent non-employees intent on harm from entering the building.

Because there is no perfect system to prevent fire, there must be a system in place to manage the fire. Automatic, self-contained, fire suppression canisters can stop fire spread before whole-system back-up sprinklers are activated. Again here, effective, consistent, training is needed to make sure every employee understands what to do during a fire. Proper methods for egress will need to be addressed. Fire Safety Guidelines will need to be developed and readdressed each year. A method must be established so that visitors, the disabled, and other at-risk groups will be able to safely exit the building.

Fire department operations design is an important area for consideration. However, other measures should be given priority. If other measures fail, fire department operations are measures of last resort. For fires necessary for fire department support, all other measures should have been exhausted and personnel removed so that firefighting becomes a property management operation, rather than a rescue operation.

Comments welcome.