OSH in the Workplace

There are many reasons to be motivated to putting in place working OSH systems. These include financial benefits in terms of reduced insurance levies from the insurer or Government regulator, to reducing the costs from damaged equipment. Contractors may need to be brought in to make sure deadlines are met, at a higher hourly rate, or customer relations are adversely affected. Then there may be ongoing costs from court fines and reparations to the victim. For some the financial costs are nothing compared to the emotional burden knowing the business could have done more to prevent serious harm or even a fatality.

What to do to improve OSH in the Workplace?

As an employer, you are responsible for the inactions or actions of your employees that cause harm to anyone. This includes fellow workers, visitors to the workplace or members of the public going about their business.  What does this mean to you? It is critical to perform a proper hazard identification and risk assessment including reviewing the tasks and equipment being used. Basic maintenance is not only smart in terms of keeping machinery operating efficiently, but in terms of OSH. But, when you have been doing something dangerous for a long time, it is easy to get used to the dangerous work and the OSH risks.

How to improve OSH?

Managing OSH then means treating the development of or growing the momentum of any OSH program as exactly that, a management program demanding planning, assigning resources and critical reviews. It is important then to decide what the Mission and Goals of the business is in terms of OSH performance. Often, businesses will simply write a job description to include OSH management and leave a person to their own devices. Take OSH management seriously in your business, and the results will be far more certain and immediate.

With all these benefits and reasons there is no excuse to start taking action now. An often heard term is OSH ‘Knowledge is Power’ but this is clearly not true. In this information age, there is more information available at our fingertips than ever before. In fact, Google have even said that since 2003 (8 years) they have doubled the amount of information available on the internet. OSH knowledge is only Potential Power. Unless you go and do something with the knowledge, it just resides within your head. It might as well stay sitting on a computer or as is often the case, within an OSH manual sitting on a bookshelf. With everything to gain and nothing to lose, take the first step at improving OSH within your workplace, and go and do something.

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