and create accident and near-miss reports, and update the company accident
record. Finally, the workplace is an optimal place from which to organize, per-
form, and evaluate both site inspections and health and safety briefings.
Yet another protocol that you can establish around the workplace to help
meet your health and safety objectives pertains to exposure summaries.
Creating a summary for each workplace enables you to see an overview of
every employee and thus more easily assess their performance on the basis
of predetermined timeframes. Later, when you compare individual summaries
with your risk assessments, you’ll be able to more clearly see the strengths
and weaknesses of your agenda and make any needed adjustments. For exam-
ple, having ascertained that one of your workplaces stands in jeopardy of an
accident due to high levels of employee exposure to hazardous substances,
you can now introduce the safety measures needed to establish or guarantee
the safety of your people. The sorts of patterns that were once obscure now
become discernible as a result of the regular documentation provided by
your exposure summaries.
The next key step here is to figure out how you can use technology to help
you manage incidents and stay organized. Automation can reap many bene-
fits and can help you identify patterns of risk that may be undetectable using
manual processes. Furthermore, in addition to implementing software that
can help you track and ultimately greatly reduce incidents and accidents,
your company should have an easy-to-use interface or e-mail-based form that
makes it easy for all employees to enter near-misses. Tracking these near-
misses closely can help you reduce accidents even further.
Assessing risks....................................................................................
Unless you have mechanisms in place to regularly assess the risks inherent
to your operations, you stand little chance of developing improvements to
your overall health and safety program. The processes involved in releasing
hazardous substances and materials, taking control measurements, following
accidents or near-misses, executing preventive monitoring are all classic
opportunities to assess risks.
Any number of methods can be deployed to do this. You can begin with the
oldest trick in the book; that is, by using observation. Actually watching how
people work to pick up the little details that contribute to an overall pattern
of behavior can produce amazing results. The more ways you can discover to
prevent accidents — much less near misses — the better off you and your
employees will be in the long run.
In addition to the various observation techniques you implement, you can
also compare measured values and reference values, and you can evaluate
questionnaires. When a risk cannot be quantified by measurements, you can
178 Part III: Going Green
