Job Hazard Analysis vs Job Safety Analysis: Which Does Your Company Need?
There’s something that you’ll notice if you are a part of the environment, health, and safety industry. Many refer to hazard analysis and safety analysis as if they’re the same thing. If you’re not very involved in the industry, it’s easy to make the mistake.
Some industry veterans, however, still make the same mistake. This can be fatal, as work can put people in danger if an analysis is incorrect.
A job hazard analysis is always in order, but how about job safety analysis? Which one of the two does your company need?
In this guide, we give you the difference between hazard analysis and safety analysis. We’ll teach you how to find the difference and what your company needs. This can help you do a safe risk assessment and do the correct procedures.
What Is Hazard Analysis
So, what is job hazard analysis? We’re going away from bland definitions, but there’s no sidestepping it.
JHA is a systematic procedure that handles every task and event as sequences. Its main job is to identify the safety areas of each task. The goal is to create a teachable step where employees are out of risky or dangerous situations.
As early as the 40s, safety has been a primary problem in industrial areas. Safety hazards were commonplace, with Tort laws providing very little value to laborers. There was no formal law that pushes business owners to make do by their laborers.
By this time, the coining of the term job analysis came. Job analysis was the idea that you can break workflow into tasks and identifying its hazards.
Even as early as the Post-World War I economy, there was a strong push towards a safe working environment. This came into fruition through the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Through this, businesses needed to provide safer working environments to their people.
After that, job analysis becomes job safety analysis.
What JSA did was find the specific tasks needed to finish a job. It handles which hazards you can find in each step.
Once it finishes identification, its next job is to create safety measures. This is to avoid the hazards it finds at every task in your workplace.
What Is Safety Analysis?
As you can see, JSA is almost the same as hazard analysis. If you don’t look at it harder, it’s almost the same thing.
The difference between safety analysis and hazard analysis is a matter of assessment. JHA adds the procedure of handling risk evaluation as a way to wrap every step. The assessment improves JHA by adding classification and hierarchy of addressable hazards.
Adding hazard probability and severity of damage shows differences between JSA and JHA. Here’s where you can find out more.
Why You Need JSA In Your Business
So, which one should you want for your business? Without a doubt, you need to use safety analysis for your business. It offers some different benefits that you can use to improve your workflow.
1. Fulfills OSHA Standards
One of the hallmark standards of OSHA is to set up heavy penalties to businesses who violate rules. These violations tend to be more common and people forget to take them into account. This includes:
- Fall protection standards
- General needs for scaffolding
- Electrical equipment, wiring, and components
- General needs for safe electrical system designs
- Machine and machine hazard protection
- Safety and hazard communication
- Lockout-Tagout (LOTO) energy controls
- Powered heavy machinery and industrial trucks
- Ladders and emergency access
- Respiratory support and protection
As you know, safe risk assessment can help give you an edge in handling such issues. This means you get as close to standards as possible, making sure you meet their needs.
This lets you avoid violations in the long run. This also means you save money on potential penalties.
Safety analysis using OSHA and even AHA standards lets you identify hazards. Once you do, you can move towards finding solutions that can mitigate these problems.
2. Allows for Easier Onboarding
During the company hiring and intake, onboarding is a crucial step to work safety. JSA allows you to improve your safety onboarding processes, allowing improvements on engagement. Proper onboarding means you take in workers as efficient as you can.
Research shows that new employees are big risks to workplace safety. If you are in industries where the intake of new workers is clockwork, you’re creating a big gamble. As they don’t understand in full the hazards and concerns in the workplace, they are easy victims.
Even when you finish a safety training session, all your greenhorns will take time to learn. People even have different ways to understand information.
Without strong engagement, you’re creating a greater risk for the business for a longer time. Your new hire are a big risk to your business that you need to take.
Completing a safety analysis means you not only speed up the process of intake. It also allows you to create better, more effective teaching aids. This can then lessen the risk for your members.
JSA creates an easier to digest breakdown of workload. It allows for easier educational opportunities for the company. Safe risk assessment can help give better information about potential hazards and their probabilities.
3. Improves Workplace Communication
JSA, by default, needs to break down the entire workflow into tasks and processes. The entire point of safe risk assessment is to identify hazards.
Every task has one, and you need to mitigate these issues. If that’s the case, you need input from different areas of the company.
The completion of a safety analysis allows for improvement of its safety communication. You receive input from everyone in your team. You get more information, connecting everyone.
Everyone gets a say on how to improve the entire work environment.
For example, safety officers can work with management to handle safe risk assessment. Once a baseline analysis happens, the middle management can communicate with lower ranks. As people on the ground know problems better, it makes them more efficient.
Once your safety analysis gathers all the information, management can then comment and review on the JSA. This affords a proper vetting procedure within the company without repercussions. It does not create a finger-pointing environment, which leads to a productive discovery.
The proper assessment also affords the company a learning phase. It shows problems that middle management or ground people do know and vice versa. all these, of course, is possible only if the team members gain something from participation.
The company needs to encourage employee contribution to JSA. By doing so, you pave a way to learn risks that cater to your expertise.
4. Improves Workplace Safety
At the end of the day, a safe risk assessment is there to keep everyone safe. Above and beyond evading any sort of penalty, you’re looking towards workplace safety. You want everyone to feel that their work environment is a safe place, which helps in productivity.
Sure, meeting OSHA’s safety standards is a good goal. Even then, you don’t want to stop there.
You know your place of business better. There will be hazards in the area that are not within OSHA’s standards. This means with the right safety analysis, you can optimize these issues out of your workplace.
Reducing any chances for illness and injury is good for business. As people get sick or ill, you either reduce your productivity until your people are ready or you add a temp force. This is money out of your bottom line.
By keeping your workers safe and healthy, you create a well-oiled machine. You keep or improve workplace productivity.
5. JSA Works Beyond Safety
JSA is not only there to help prevent injuries by creating safer, more efficient work practices. It provides benefits that are not related to safety as well.
For example, a safe risk assessment outlines job descriptions better as a matter of task. It identifies who is responsible for which jobs and identifies what needs to happen. This keeps everyone accountable with each other, which can improve reliability.
It can also help improve the morale of your employees. Unions, since the dawn of industry, pushed for safer, better working standards. A company that provides this atmosphere is a place where people are willing to stay.
Much like how people care about salary, people care for safety as much. A safe environment is a great way to help improve the relationship of your employees with the workplace.
Why Your Company Needs Job Hazard Analysis Now
When it comes to the difference between job hazard analysis and job safety analysis, the devil’s in the details. Safety analysis goes far beyond identification hazards in the workplace. It handles the probability and risk of hazards and tries to create a hierarchy on what is most important.
By doing so, you’re optimizing your business not only for safety but for improved work conditions as well. This is why you need JSA in your business as soon as possible.
If you’re looking for other ways to improve your business, take a look at our other guides. We have many different tips and tricks you can use to help your business as soon as possible.
