Employee involvement programs

Employee involvement programs, such as quality circles and... 

What should you consider when developing programs to increase driver involvement at your company There are ten basic principles which serve as important guidelines for the establishment of employee involvement programs ... 

Organization of the programs should be kept simple and clear. A weakness of many employee involvement programs is over-organization, with a superstructure that soon collapses under its own weight. As with many things, simpler is usually better. 

Some leadership of the employee involvement program should come from front-line operations — namely dispatchers, supervisors, and operations managers. This assures direct operational participation rather than only from staff management. 

Employee involvement programs are an important part of, but not a substitute for, the company-wide quality transport safety policies and procedures. 

For the folks who report to them, they are the company. About half the questions in the popular Gallup Employee Engagement survey touch more or less directly on the relationship with the supervisor. Research going back several decades found that first-line supervisors had the most impact on the effectiveness of employee involvement programs, and (paradoxically) were most likely to be left out of the planning and implementation of such programs. 

HAZWOPER, related DOE, and the Army Corps of Engineers rules and requirements stipulate that employees involved in any of the following activities who have a reasonable possibility of exposure to hazardous substances or health hazards at specified levels (see 1910.120 [f [2]) should be included in a medical surveillance program ... 

Where PSM is being extended to cover additional functions at a plant with installed PSM systems, the extension can be done at minimum cost. In such cases several staff-months of effort should suffice. If you apply PSM to an activity or location without existing PSM programs, the effort is greater. For example, installation of PSM at a terminal operation would require adaptation of existing systems to the nature and scope of the terminal operation, training of personnel, and roll-out of programs. The effort per employee involved in this will be similar to the effort involved in each plant s PSM roll-out. 

For the most part, future trends will be found in liazard accident prevention, not liazard analysis. To help promote liazard accident prevention, companies should start employee-training programs. These programs should be designed to alert staff and employees about tlie liazards tliey are exposed to on tlie job. Training should also cover company safety policies and tlie proper procedures to follow in case an accident does occur. A major avenue to reducing risk will involve source reduction of hazardous materials. Risk education and communication are two other areas tliat will need iniprovemcnt. 

Whether it is for the development of new package formats, such as for intranasal drug administration or transdermal patches, or for more traditional delivery systems, such as cycle packs, solutions, or aerosols, the need to educate employees involved in the processing is essential to the transfer program s success. Identifying and controlling process variables are necessary while experience is gained, and the process is optimized and validated. 

One of the new creative ideas to promote employee involvement and the expression of their ideas is the targeted hazard identification system. This system provides an easy and cost-efficient method through which employees are trained to identify safety hazards in their workplace and provides a mechanism through which the hazard can be corrected. Additionally, this system provides a simple method by which employees can express their ideas and acquire feedback within a 24-hour time period (see Appendix C for program details). Important components of this program are the anployee involvement and the acquisition of their opinions to generate corrective action. 

Cappelli et al. 1997 Levine and Tyson 1990). The search for improved performance not only has changed woik processes for many employees, it also has led to changes in the size of the woikforce itself. Corporations seek to become more cost-competitive by reducing their number of employees. Corporations also seek to become efficient by changing their corporate safety culture. For example, they may change the level of employee involvement or the types of safety programs they employ. 

The intent of this paragraph is to require employers to involve employees at an elemental level of the PSM program. Minimum requirements for an Employee Participation Program for PSM must include a written plan of action for implementing employee consultation on the development of PHAs and other elements of process hazard management contained within 1910.119. The employer must also provide ready access to all the information required to be developed under the standard. ... 

OSHA requires that the Employee Participation program be written down. This can be difficult to do well because Employee Participation is involved in so many areas of process safety and because participation represents a state of mind rather than a specific program. 

B. Employee Involvement An employer should provide for and encourage employee involvement in the ergonomics program and in decisions which effect the worker safety and health, including the following ... 

Usually, there is little management involvement. In some cases, management cannot even see what the observers are finding. In short, it often is an employee-only program. 

The most important element of any effort to engage and empower the workforce, and drive a company s culture toward world-class lean or safety, is communications. Effective communications are critical because it is through communications that you can gain trust. And only when you gain trust will the culture shift toward the intended direction. The definition of empowerment that I most often use is the downward flow of information. Therefore, what information can be provided to guide a so-so safety program, with minimal employee involvement, into one that other plants will want to benchmark Some of the topics listed below were already mentioned elsewhere in the book, but to fully understand the depth of safety communications available, I will restate your options. 

The ability to impact people and, therefore, the cultural side of safety will determine the success of a safety program. In this chapter, the elements of an existing compliance-based safety program are contrasted with a proactive, employee involvement-based, lean safety program. 

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