As far as occupational health and safety are concerned, the devil is always in the details. There will be countless safety hazards in every workplace and it’s up to employers to be aware of all of them. Some will be obvious to everyone while others will be easy to forget about or overlook.

Question: I just took an EHS role with a company that is working on cleaning up its safety programs and improving its safety culture. So far everyone talks a good game about safety and having a “safety first” mindset but I’m noticing that sometimes when I bring problems to management, the responses I get are frequently things like; “We’ll work on the safety stuff when all the other fires are out” and “We’ll put money in the budget to handle that issue next year.” It seems like these responses are sending mixed messages and I’m never sure how to respond. What’s a good way to handle these responses?

Question: After every significant incident we complete the “5 Why” process. This is supposed to help us identify more accurate root causes that will help us find better solutions to prevent recurrence except, it rarely does either thing. Most of the participants haven’t gotten a lot of training in this process and are afraid to discuss the hard truths about why incidents often occur and even worse, their solution to almost everything is to “perform retraining”. How can we move past this and start to get some value out of this process?

For any business, it’s critical for employees to share whenever there is an accident or a close call. Of course, there is a science to incident reporting that should be followed closely. If employers and their workers take the right steps when reporting safety accidents, they can be addressed the right way and it’ll be easier to prevent similar accidents in the future.

In occupational safety, there’s an old adage that if you see something say something. In other words, if a worker is concerned with any workplace hazard that may impact the safety of an employee, they should speak up. Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple when it comes to workplace safety hazards. But how should employees react to recognizing a potential safety hazard? Let’s look at the appropriate steps that should be taken to help address any workplace safety hazards.

We talk a lot about your safety responsibilities as an employer. After all, under OSHA rules, the bulk of legal responsibility falls on you (barring a few extremely rare exemptions).

You work hard to ensure your customers have a great experience every time. But sometimes, the problem isn’t your product or your work.

Every day, 2,000 workers in the U.S. suffer a job-related eye injury requiring medical treatment, with one-third of them requiring treatment in hospital emergency departments.

You don’t like to think about what might happen when things go horribly wrong. But sometimes, despite your best efforts, something still goes awry.

How many times do we see construction workers in potentially dangerous situations? How many times do we pass a job site and see a worker in an unprotected trench?