7 Benefits of a Robust Job Safety Analysis (JSA) Process to Improve Safety Performance

Job Safety Analysis, also known as Job Hazard Analysis (JHA), is a framework that helps with analyzing a particular task (or operational process) from a safety and risk perspective.

The JSA process involves the following steps:

• Choosing the job or process to be analyzed

• For example, the job could involve the usage of inflammable materials or performing a task at a very high temperature.

• Detailing the sequence of steps involved in completing the job

• For example, in the case of hot work being performed, the steps will include a permit-to-work being issued, personnel with relevant training and expertise being on the job, protective equipment worn, risk control measures taken, etc.

• Determining the potential hazards

• This will include a robust risk assessment process, to ensure the company takes proactive steps to prevent any safety incidents.

• Detailing the preventive measures to overcome these hazards

• This will include specific actions taken including training and certification requirements of the person doing the job, job scheduling without other risky conflicts, etc.

The safety team can perform the JSA by observing the worker performing the job to identify the potential hazards. However, if it is a new job or a type of job that is not done often, this approach may not be effective.

An alternative is for a group of experienced workers and supervisors, along with the safety team, to conduct a discussion to analyze the task. This provides the advantage of pooling in the experience of several people and choosing the best set of preventive and risk control measures.

The discussion findings can be documented and shared with all the relevant workers and managers, made part of training as well as standard operating procedures, and used for inspections or observations. It can be useful as a reference point when conducting comprehensive accident investigations.

Since there are many processes involved in any business function, the best way to prioritize the jobs to be analyzed so that resources can be effectively used is:

• To identify tasks where the accident frequency is higher
• Where the severity of injuries or illnesses is higher
• When introducing a new job
• When modifying an existing procedure (Management of Change)
• Infrequently performed jobs

7 Key Benefits of a Well-Planned JSA Workflow Across Departments

Some of the many benefits of JSA include:

1. Identify Hidden Hazards Proactively: This may be clichéd, but prevention is certainly better than being reactive. With a well-designed JSA process, hidden hazards can be identified and mitigated to prevent future events. With a solution like ComplianceQuest EHS, the entire JSA process can be automated, complete with necessary checklists, training, documentation, and risk management workflows in place.

2. Employee-First Approach to Safety: It helps approach the task using safer and more efficient methods while minimizing the risks for workers on the job.

3. Create Safety and Health Awareness Among Workers: Employee involvement in workplace safety is very important to create a culture of safety. JSA helps employees become aware of the hazards involved in their tasks and the best practices to perform them efficiently and safely.

4. Improve Communication and Enable a Collaborative Mindset: As the identification of hazards requires a collaborative effort from the workers and their supervisors, it improves communication and collaboration.

5. Better Acceptance of Safe Work Procedures: The collaborative environment of JSA helps with improved acceptance of safe work practices across the organization.

6. Enables Comprehensive Investigations: The involvement of workers, supervisors, and safety leaders helps provide a holistic view of the task and identify any potential hazard more easily.

7. Establish SOPs for New Jobs: Often, in the absence of JSA, hazards of new tasks come to light after an event. But with JSA, the hazards can be identified in advance and best practices established, making them the SOP for that task.

Of course, there are other benefits, such as improved compliance, improved training material, and so on, leading to a much safer work environment while enabling continuous improvement.

Automating the Hazard Analysis Process with ComplianceQuest

Hazard analysis should be initiated at the beginning of a project and implemented throughout the product’s lifecycle. This helps to ensure sufficient control measures are in place at the various stages and constantly assessed and monitored for effectiveness.

However, the process of managing JSAs across the organization becomes extremely complex when the right EHS Solution is not used. A manual approach of maintaining JSA documents and tracking status through spreadsheets and e-mails will only result in a half-baked effort.

Moreover, a good JSA process will throw out extremely useful information (safety observations, potential hazard identification, spotting risky processes, lack of training) for proactive safety management efforts.

For time, cost, and resource effectiveness, a solution like ComplianceQuest’s Safety Management Solution can help to automate the entire hazard analysis workflow. It provides seamless access to data and an end-to-end view of all potential hazards.

The ComplianceQuest solution can help with:

• Defining the parameters for hazards analysis
• Reviewing processes end-to-end
• Identifying and prioritizing risks based on the severity
• Recommending control measures to mitigate the risks
• Managing JSA Documentation
• Tracking and monitoring all open action items related to the JSA workflow

Some of the key features of ComplianceQuest’s Safety Management Solution that facilitate this include:

• Incident Management software provides a repository of past injuries, accidents, near misses, and observations that facilitates analysis to help identify trends.
• The root cause analysis capability helps digitize the process, providing all stakeholders with insights into areas of concern and taking suitable action.
• Risk Management to identify and prioritize risks based on frequency and severity for better resource management
• Document Management to document the findings, facilitating collaboration and communication
• Audit Management to schedule audits and record the learnings for corrective and preventive action
• Permit-to-Work to ensure that only authorized personnel work on hazardous tasks with sufficient training and protection

The ComplianceQuest solution enables the following types of hazard analysis:

• Function Failure Analysis to identify a system whose performance does not meet a specified standard
• Cause-Consequence Diagrams to determine the cause of an incident and its impact on future events
• Hazard and Operability Studies to examine complex processes (proposed or existing) in a structured and systematic method to recognize and assess risks to employees or equipment
• Fault Tree Analysis – a type of failure analysis to identify the root cause of a failure at a systemic level
• Event Tree Analysis is an inductive procedure that reveals the possible outcomes of an event using a top-down, logical framework

To know more about ComplianceQuest’s Safety Management Software, visit: https://www.compliancequest.com/lp/ehs/