Job Safety Analysis

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Maintain an Effective Safety Culture

Companies strive to avoid injuries in the workplace, but close calls and near miss situations are common without proper safety measures. Proactive safety and security measures should be a habit for all employees.

You can help prevent workplace injuries and illnesses by establishing proper work procedures, and one of the best ways to do this is to conduct a job safety analysis (JSA).

JSAs are applicable across all industries. A JSA should be part of training, evaluations and onboarding for all employees. By engaging all employees, JSAs are more complete, more risks are identified and safety increases.

It is important to review JSAs periodically to ensure they remain current and continue to help reduce workplace accidents and injuries. Even if the job has not changed, it is possible to identify additional hazards.

JSAs should also be reviewed if an illness or injury occurs. A JSA can serve as a quality tool during an incident investigation, asking questions such as “Was a hazard missed?” or “Was the employee following protocol?”

An effective JSA is a multi-step process that breaks down a job task into individual steps and provides an awareness of the hazards and possible mitigation strategies for each:

• Basic Job Steps: Break the job into a sequence of steps. Each of the steps should accompany some major task. That task will consist of a series of movements. Look at each series of movements within that basic task.

• Potential Hazards: To complete a JSA effectively, you must identify the hazards or potential hazards associated with each step. Every possible source of energy must be identified. It is important to look at the entire environment to determine every conceivable hazard. Hazards contribute to accidents and injuries.

• Recommended Job Safety Procedures: Decide what actions are necessary to eliminate, control, or minimize hazards that could lead to accidents, injuries, damage to the environment, or possible occupational illness. Each safe job procedure or action must correspond to the job steps and identified hazards.

Implementing the JSA process and executing the resulting plan can lead to:

• Fewer injuries

• More effective work methods

• Reduced workers’ compensation costs

• Increased productivity
    

While a JSA is a useful tool, it is just one component of the larger commitment to a work safety culture.
 

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OSHA
Environment, Health & Safety, University of California, Berkeley