This material is for training purposes only. Its purpose is to inform employers and employees of best practices in occupational safety and health and general OSHA compliance requirements. This material is not a substitute for any provision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act or any standards issued by OSHA.
MODULE 2: ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES
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Introduction
Safety committee members need to understand the role of the safety committee and what role they personally play as a member of the committee. Unless roles are understood, it's difficult to effectively carry out assigned responsibilities that achieve the safety committee's purpose. |
Safety Committee Role: Describes Who You Are
The term, role, describes who we are. At home, we may play the role of a spouse, coach, father, or mother. At work, our position is the label given to the role we play. As you learned if you took Online Course 101, Safety Committee Operations, the most effective safety committee performs the role as internal consultant team to the employer. On the other hand, the least effective safety committee will function as an internal fault-finding police squad. It's essential to understand your role if you want to design the most effective safety committee meetings. Can you imagine what a meeting would look like if members believed they were all junior OSHA inspectors that had to control things? The meeting would be very different than one in which the safety committee acted like a consultant team.
Safety Committee Members: Each has an important role to play.
Each member of the safety committee must understand the very important role they play within the safety committee. There are no unimportant positions. Let's take a quick look at some different roles and associated responsibilities in a safety committee:
Chairperson
- Schedules monthly meetings
- Develops agendas for meetings
- Conducts monthly meetings
- Assumes chair’s duties when the chair is absent
- Coordinates training for new representatives
- Performs other duties assigned by the chair
- Takes minutes at each meeting
- Distributes copies of minutes to representatives
- Posts minutes for other employees to review
- Maintains the safety-committee file
- Keeps minutes and agendas on file for three years
- Report employees’ safety and health concerns to the committee
- Report accidents, near miss incidents, and unsafe workplace conditions to the committee
- Suggest items to include in the monthly meeting agenda
- Encourage employees to report workplace hazards and suggest how to control them
- Establish procedures for conducting quarterly workplace inspections and for making recommendations
- to management to eliminate or control hazards
- Help management evaluate the company’s safety and health program and recommend how to improve it
- Establish procedures for investigating the causes of accidents and near-miss incidents
Safety Committee Purpose: What you intend to do
So we know who we are. Now we can better figure out what we are going to do to fulfill our role as a consultant group. First, let's take a look at the subtle difference between two important terms: purpose and function. You will hear these terms from time to time and it's easy to think of them as meaning the same thing. However, they actually mean something different. What's the difference?
- Purpose is defined as an intended outcome. What does the safety committee intend to do?
- Function refers to the actual outcome. What does the safety committee actually do?
What is the purpose of the safety committee?
The intention of most effective safety committees is to bring workers and management together in a non-adversarial, cooperative effort to promote safety and health in each workplace. The committee assists the employer and makes recommendations for change. The safety committee is tasked with some pretty important responsibilities. In fact, if the safety committee is able to effectively accomplish each of the intended actions, they can serve as a catalyst to improve the safety management system and they can literally can "transform" your safety culture. Let's see how the safety committee meeting "fits" into the purpose statement:
- The safety committee meeting is the time and place to bring management and labor together. This is a major idea. Management and labor must be talking with each other. The more the two groups talk, the more they understand each other. Why is it important to talk? Think about this principle: "If you keep people in the dark, they think the worst." If management and labor are not talking, they will think the worst about each other.
- The meeting should reflect a non-adversarial, cooperative working relationship between management and labor. It's essential (I call it the prime directive) that safety committees help build understanding and trust between labor and management. W. Edward's Deming, in his book, Out of the Crisis, states that to achieve true operational quality, the employer must "drive out fear" (Element 8) in the workplace. Increased cooperation, not competition, between management and labor is a crucial criteria in every action the safety committee takes.
- The meeting is the primary communications tool used to help promote safety and health in the workplace. There are many ways to "promote" safety and health. The meeting can be the place to design and implement ideas and activities that can increase employee awareness and attitudes about safety.
- Finally, a primary activity in each meeting is to develop recommendations to improve safety and health programs within the safety management system. Helping your employer improve the safety management system is probably the most important long-term goal of the safety committee. Meetings need to be designed to allow time for analysis and evaluation of safety and health programs so that effective recommendations can be written.
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