9/8/2021 How to Set up Effective Health and Safety Committees

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HEALTH & SAFETY

How to Set up Effective Health and Safety

Committees
Health and safety committees over the past few years have become very effective ways of gaining stronger employee
participation and buy-in when it comes to safety, health and welfare matters affecting employees at the workplace.  

WRIT TEN BY GILLIAN

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Health and safety committees over the past few years have
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become very effective ways of gaining stronger employee
brings you here?
participation and buy-in when it comes to safety, health and
welfare matters affecting employees at the workplace.
 

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9/8/2021 How to Set up Effective Health and Safety Committees

Employee Participation 
Such teams can provide a good option for organizations that have a significant number of workers that may be
reluctant to take on the role of a health and safety representative, but be willing to participate in a group that can
collectively provide input to the organization. A committee may also be effective if you have a large business and
need to consult on matters that are the same across a number of work groups or workplaces.

In an ever-evolving workplace, safety practices and standards have very much started focusing on employee
engagement and involvement in making safety decisions. This has even become more clear in the recently
introduced ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System, where employee participation in
safety decisions is one of the key concepts being presented in the standard.

If health and safety standards are to improve, full cooperation and commitment of employees are essential. Where
selected, they must be able to fully participate in the making and monitoring of health and safety arrangements
within their workplace in order to gain their interest in accepting their full share of responsibility. Appointing a
safety committee is surely one of the methods that can increase that commitment.

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Best practice for setting up safety committees:

Start by having someone from top management act as a sponsor for the committee, with their b
responsibility, to ensure that these meetings consistently take place.

It is no secret that successful safety initiatives heavily rely on leadership participation and bein
sponsor of such a program is a way for the manager to demonstrate the importance of health a
Select a Sponsor:
their team, even though they may not always be able to participate themselves due to their oth
responsibilities.

They can be asked to choose the persons that would best contribute to the team and also be in
selecting a chairperson for their meetings.

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Assign a Chairperson:
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The chairperson should ideally be someone who is first at a supervisory level, secondly, being g
passionate about health and safety at the workplace and thirdly, be an employee of one of the o
departments. It is important that they are not members of the health and safety department. T
is the focal point of contact between the sponsor and the committee and may escalate points d
sponsor where further management support is required to resolve high-level health and safety

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9/8/2021 How to Set up Effective Health and Safety Committees

Provide meeting support:
Carefully Consider the Members meetings. The members must be willing to take on responsibilities outside of the meeting and
are to manage the meetings, work with the health and safety department where required and i
and delegate actions to members of the team where appropriate.
As the chairman or chairwoman normally has much of their own responsibilities, I normally hav
selected as a meeting support. Although I have seen some committees select secretaries and a
assistance for this role, I have found that having a health and safety department representative
works best. In addition to basic administrative tasks such as taking actions and supporting the
with the minutes of the meeting, having a health and safety representative as the meeting supp
for technical safety support to be provided. It is important in this situation to ensure that the sa
representative does not take over the meeting and only contributes where required.
Members of the different sections of the business need to be represented within the committee
preferred that the majority of roles be from the shop floor level or persons directly in charge of
the work within the business. Some supervisory positions could also be represented. Such an a
provides the best forum where employees could contribute and speak freely within the commit
solution rather than only highlighting safety problems during the consultation. As a rule, I norm
on the basis that actions can only be assigned to persons present in the meeting, where furthe
clarification was needed, one of the members was responsible to follow up or meet with the re
personnel after the meeting.

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Safety Committee Meetings

The following points highlight some of the basic areas that should be discussed
during safety committee meetings, a certain amount of preparation is usually
required by the Chairperson as well as the Meeting Support prior to starting:
1. Start with a safety moment highlighting a relevant topic; This could be lessons learnt from an incident, recent
safety concerns within the organizations or health and safety moments related to a certain period of time (hot
summer months, cold winter periods, turnaround periods etc.). This could also be used as a very brief training
opportunity on a common workplace risk.
2. Discuss improved areas from the previous month followed by areas that require further work
3. Review outstanding actions from previous months and ensure accountability and status of the actions are
communicated and kept up to date.
4. Discuss any major incidents or near misses and highlight lessons learned and how it would be communicated
to the rest of the company.
5. Review previous month health, safety and environmental statistics. Try to focus only on leading indicator data.
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6. Select a number of points to be communicated to top management. interest in EcoOnline! What

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As an advisory body, the effectiveness of the committee very much depends on the results it achieves, and this, in
turn, depends on actions being taken by the management as well as the sponsor to implement the
recommendations. It is at that level only that the recommendations can be truly translated into company wide
actions. In time, given consistency in application, management teams will begin to more and more relay on the
committees to provide effective solutions to health and safety problems.
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9/8/2021 How to Set up Effective Health and Safety Committees

All in all, these committees need to be used to empower employees to make health and safety decisions in relation
to their workplace. The collective participation in improving health and safety aspects of their organizations has a
huge impact on increasing employee morale, leadership and further enhancing the collective safety culture.

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AUTHOR

gillian
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