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Thinking About Safety Management Software? Think About JSA Software, Too

EHS professionals are always trying to improve their workplace safety management programs, and implementing a safety management software system represents a major milestone along that journey.

• By Phil N. Molé
• May 03, 2024

EHS professionals are always trying to improve their workplace safety management programs, and implementing a safety management software system represents a major milestone along that journey. Good safety software simplifies key tasks such as safety data sheet (SDS) management, completion and tracking of inspections, incident investigations, training, and management of follow-up actions while reducing the time, effort, and resources required to effectively manage workplace safety. Unfortunately, many EHS professionals fail to make the most of their safety software purchase because they overlook the fundamental connection between safety and risk management and how operational risk management techniques like job safety analysis (JSA) can provide insights to improve safety performance.

Let’s discuss why organizations looking to implement safety software should also strongly consider implementing JSA software capabilities.

Operational Risk Management is the Foundation of Safety Management

The chart below shows some examples of hazards, associated risks, and potential risk outcomes.

As the chart above shows, occupational injuries and illnesses are the outcome of hazards and risks. The job of an EHS professional is to identify and address these hazards and implement appropriate controls to reduce the likelihood of an incident or injury happening and/or reduce the potential impacts if they happen.

Safety management activities are, at their foundation, risk identification and control activities. For example:

Inspections

Why do you conduct inspections? Some inspections are compliance obligations, such as inspections for hazardous waste storage locations, inspections of powered industrial trucks (PITs) such as forklifts, or inspections of fire suppression systems and other emergency response equipment. Other inspections may be required by internal management policies or are just common-sense aspects of safety management, such as ensuring that walkways are unobstructed.

However, there are deeper objectives to inspections beyond box-checking. In the US, OSHA requires employers to inspect their PITs precisely because failing to do so increases the probability of incidents such as loss of hydraulic pressure that can result in a falling load and potentially serious injury or death. When you conduct inspections, you’re identifying hazards to address to reduce risks of adverse outcomes.

Incident Investigations and Reporting

This category may have a less obvious foundation in risk management because, by definition, you conduct incident investigations after incidents happen. Still, it’s not just a bookkeeping exercise. You gather information about underlying reasons, or root causes, why the incident happened so you can address those causes and prevent recurrences. That’s why OSHA designed Form 301(“Injury and Illness Report”) to capture specific details about why and how the incident happened, as the screen capture below shows.

Employee Engagement is Central to Safety and Risk Management

Employee involvement in safety management is necessary for success, but many companies fail to provide their people with direct opportunities to contribute their knowledge, experience, and skills, inadvertently saddling EHS teams with much of the work. This situation isn’t fair for anyone involved (or not involved) and increases the likelihood that major workplace risks will go unidentified and uncontrolled.

Because of considerations like these, the developers of ISO 45001, the international standard for occupational health & safety (OH&S) management, emphasize the importance of involving all employees in safety management. Section 5.4 of 45001 states:

“The organization shall establish, implement and maintain a process(es) for consultation and participation of workers at all applicable levels and functions, and, where they exist, workers’ representatives, in the development, planning, implementation, performance evaluation and actions for improvement of the OH&S management system.”

A risk assessment method known as a job safety analysis (JSA) is a perfect tool for assessing and controlling risks and promoting employee engagement.

JSAs Are an Integral Part of a Robust, Proactive Safety Management System

A JSA, also known as job hazard analysis (JHA), is a way to identify occupational hazards and appropriate controls to reduce risks of injuries and illnesses. JSAs break down work into job tasks and involve observing employees performing the tasks to identify hazards, so you can initiate corrective actions to reduce risk.

The effectiveness of JSAs (when done right) is widely recognized among EHS professionals and regulators, including OSHA, who’ve published extensive guidance on their use.

To complete JSAs, employers follow these steps:

• Involve employees: Determine which employees to involve in creating the JSAs, based on their job functions and familiarity with the specific tasks.
• Review incident records: Identify which areas and associated jobs have the highest injury rates and the highest rates of severe injuries leading to restricted duty or days away from work and use this analysis to prioritize creation of JSAs.
• Preliminary job review: Work with the employees you selected to discuss the hazards they know to exist and ideas for controls to address the risks. Use this information to further prioritize JSA development.
• Outline the job tasks: Break the job down into enough tasks to accurately identify hazards or risks at each step (without overdoing it). Then, describe the controls in place, or additional controls needed to reduce risks to acceptable levels.

How Does Software Help You Get the Most Out of Your JSAs?

Many EHS professionals know about JSAs and have completed them, but completing JSAs and getting the most out of them are two different things. EHS managers often aren’t fully using JSAs to improve workplace safety because they lack the right tools. Luckily, operational risk software can help you overcome the limitations of paper and legacy desktop applications. Here’s how.

Software Promotes More Accurate JSAs

A lack of standardization in the JSA process leads to variability, particularly in risk scoring and assessment, and decreases the reliability of results. Adding to this challenge, many EHS professionals completing JSAs lack backgrounds in risk management and may have uncertainty regarding selection of controls, or determination of risk reduction factors associated with specific controls.

Operational risk software helps overcome these challenges through a standardized methodology, so your people do JSAs the same way – and the right way – every time. You can select appropriate controls for identified risks from a drop-down menu, apply industry-standard risk reduction factors, and the software automatically calculates risk reduction based on selected controls. You don’t have to be a risk management expert to do your JSAs like an expert, because expertise is built into the software.

Software Encourages Better Participation in Safety Management

ISO 45001 emphasizes “consultation and participation” of frontline workers, but as previously discussed, the process of developing JSAs often exemplifies how not to encourage employee engagement with safety management. JSAs existing only on paper or desktop applications discourage participation because it’s harder for multiple employees to share responsibility and contribute. Employees may also lack the support needed to know how to effectively complete the JSA.

Operational risk software democratizes JSAs by letting employees access and participate from anywhere using mobile devices, and provides an intuitive stepwise methodology with prompts to guide employees through the process. You can also easily share completed JSAs and associated activities (e.g., implementation of controls) to show employees how their participation led to job safety improvements and encourage future participation.

Software Makes Your JSAs Accessible

JSAs ideally provide accurate information about risks and controls, but EHS management often fails to capitalize on these intended benefits because JSAs are inaccessible. Anyone who’s reviewed JSA management practices at many facilities has probably seen paper JSAs stashed in a file cabinet, gathering dust, and often long out-of-date. Even electronic JSA files often sit dormant in a virtual folder on a computer desktop – not many people access them, or even know how to access them.

The best operational risk software makes your JSAs accessible from anywhere on either desktop or mobile devices via the cloud so you and your people can use the JSAs to work safely. If any significant changes in your job processes affect how you perform the job tasks or the effectiveness of associated risk controls, you can easily revise the JSA and reshare the updated document with your people.

Software Provides Enterprise-Level Insights into Risk Trends

Manually completed and inaccessible JSAs often require big labor investments to extract actionable information from them.

With operational risk software, you get dashboards to help identify trends in types of hazards across your facilities, and have the enterprise-level view of risk patterns you need for better decision making. You can also verify that risk controls are in place and working as planned.

In short, operational risk management is the foundation of better safety management. Adding JSA capabilities to your software platform can help you improve engagement with your safety management system, reduce risks, and build business resilience.