Is your health and safety management reactive? Do you handle things as they happen? Do you react to problems when they occur?
Or would you say you're more proactive? You look forward and plan for what could be around the corner. You try to eliminate problems before they happen.
In facilities and building management, we often talk about proactive and reactive maintenance. Simplified, reactive maintenance involves fixing things when they break and being proactive means preventing them from breaking. You may not have heard these phrases about health and safety, but they can be applied in the same way.
But what's the difference between proactive and reactive health and safety management? Should you use one, or the other, or both?
Proactive health and safety measures
Proactive safety management is all about keeping ahead of the game, resolving any issues before an incident or an accident occurs.
Proactive safety measures include:
Inspections
Interviewing
Audits
Monitoring performance
Monitoring behaviour
Checking procedures
Safety sampling
Proactive safety inspections, regular auditing, ongoing training, near-miss reporting and active supervision will all form part of a proactive safety management structure. An accident hasn't happened yet. You're looking for areas where you could make improvements. Tasks or activities that could be safer.
In the short term, proactive safety measures can seem more expensive. You are spending time (and money) on health and safety before any safety or health issues may have developed.
But you are also spending time (and money) on your terms. There's no emergency. No one is hurt. No HSE inspectors buzzing around. No insurance companies are on the phone.
The benefits of a proactive safety regime are that it will enforce a positive safety culture, help to prevent accidents from occurring, and improve health and safety budgeting.
Reactive health and safety management is about dealing with issues, accidents and incidents when they occur. Unlike proactive safety management, it's too late to stop them. Reactive safety measures are about putting things right.
Reactive safety measures include:
Accident reporting
Accident investigation
Incident investigation
Ill health and sickness reviews
Identifying trends
With reactive health and safety measures, you are taking action after things have gone wrong. This often means there is more pressure to take action quickly so work can continue and people feel there is no risk of reoccurrence.
There may also be external pressure from insurance companies, clients, and the HSE if the incident is serious.
In the long term, reactive safety measures tend to be more costly. You will need to put in place many of the same things that could have been done before an accident occurred, plus the extra costs, time and resources associated with an accident.
Which is best, proactive or reactive?
It might seem obvious by now that we favour a proactive safety management approach. It's almost always cheaper in the long run, and of course, it's better to prevent an accident before it happens than wait for one to happen.
You may need to take the same action in the end, whether you were reactive or proactive. It's just that when working proactivity, you can do things on your terms, to your schedule. And without the damage of an accident.
For example, during a proactive safety sample of your workforce, you might identify that a member of staff needs more training to operate a machine safely. In a reactive safety management system, you might not identify the training requirement until an accident occurs. In both situations, you need to arrange the training. The difference is, in the reactive example there may also be costs associated with unplanned time off work, the accident, and any damage caused.
Safety management cannot achieve its stated purposes by responding alone, since that will only correct what has happened. Safety management must instead be proactive...
As we mentioned earlier, you can compare this same strategy with maintenance. It often costs less to routinely service and to maintain equipment to prevent a breakdown, rather than letting it break down and having to pay for expensive repairs or replacement.
Proactive safety management can be seen as maintaining your health and safety standards and performance, planning ahead and scheduling the work needed to keep your workforce safe.
The better you maintain your equipment, and proactively replace it within the recommended time frames, the less likely you will suffer an unexpected breakdown. The better your proactive safety management, the less chance of an accident occurring.
Be more proactive, less reactive.
Of course, you can't plan for everything. Unless you have a crystal ball and can see the future, surprises will always happen. But being more proactive means that you can prevent problems before they happen. And that means fewer unplanned interruptions, headaches and emergencies.
Just like when a breakdown occurs, you need to rely on reactive maintenance or emergency repair work to resolve the issue, if an accident or incident occurs, you need to rely on reactive health and safety management to resolve the issue. But by being more proactive, you make these emergencies less likely to happen.
And just like in building management, if you plan ahead, you can bring long-term health and safety benefits to an organisation.
Think long-term.
The initial upfront cost of proactive safety measures can sometimes put people off. After all, there hasn't been an accident yet. Maybe you will be ok for another week? Or month? Remember when we said that proactive safety measures are more expensive in the short term? Well, that short-term expenditure will suddenly seem like a much better deal compared to dealing with, and trying to recover from, an accident.
Aside from the increased costs, reactive safety management will also increase the strain on resources and disruption.
Not only might part of your workforce be injured as a result of an accident, but you may need to put a project on hold while you find the resources to implement any reactive measures you need. And on top of that, you need to investigate the accident, replace injured staff, reassure clients, and deal with insurance and the HSE.
With proactive safety management, you can plan health and safety improvements to minimise disruption. Carry out training and inspections on a schedule of your choosing. Not be forced into it when an accident occurs and the HSE and insurance companies are breathing down your neck.
Costs more later
Every business needs to keep people safe. Employers have legal health and safety responsibilities. It's the law.
So it's a question of when, not if, you need to spend time (and some money and resources) on health and safety.
The pitfalls of reactive safety management have many parallels with reactive maintenance. It is more expensive than planned proactive safety management because the damage has already been done. When you are reacting to an accident or incident there are many additional demands placed on the situation, because it may be an emergency.
Reactive safety management and monitoring is a measurement of failure when something has gone wrong. Proactive safety management and monitoring is a measurement of success, a way to keep things working right and safe.
However, reactive safety measures still have a place, even in a proactive health and safety management system. Always prepare for a failure in your controls measures. Part of proactive safety management will involve planning for emergencies and putting in place accident reporting and investigation procedures, in the hope that you will not have to use them.
There is room for both proactive and reactive safety management within all organisations, but the better your proactive safety management becomes the less reactive requirements you should have.
Want to be more proactive with your health and safety? Start by risk assessing your work and make sure you have the right policies and procedures in place.
This article was written by Emma at HASpod. Emma has over 10 years experience in health and safety and BSc (Hons) Construction Management. She is NEBOSH qualified and Tech IOSH.
In health and safety, a reactive response happens after an injury or illness has occurred and usually has the purpose of minimizing the costs associated with the injury or illness. On the other hand, a proactive response to safety and health in the workplace takes place before an accident has occurred.
Being proactive means anticipating accidents, being prepared, minimizing response times, decreasing the number of injuries that occur in the workplace, and as a result, reducing the number of worker's compensation claims.
Reactive risk management simply involves the ability to respond quickly to safety events. By definition, it is a response based approach to risk. This means that reactive safety management is practiced after a risk has occurred.
Active monitoring – to ensure that health and safety standards are correct in the workplace before accidents, incidents or ill-health are caused. Reactive monitoring – using accidents, incidents and ill-health as indicators of performance to highlight areas of concern.
Reactive programs kick in only after an accident has occurred. Some examples of reactive safety programs include: Accident investigation to fix the blame, not the system.
Reactive monitoring. Reactive monitoring is carried out when an incident has occurred. It involves: investigating accidents and incidents, including near misses. monitoring cases of ill-health and sickness absence records.
By. Any measure with the action of altering a response under examination. For instance, if a subject is aware of clinical observation, their reactions may be altered more by t he observer than the stimulus itself.
What is reactive vs proactive management? Reactive management is when leaders respond to crises and issues as they arise. Proactive management means anticipating needs and challenges so that you and your team are prepared to overcome them. It's impossible to anticipate every circ*mstance.
Proactive change is change that is initiated by an organisation because it is desirable to do so. Reactive change is change initiated in an organisation because it is made necessary by outside forces.
Any company wishing to promote a “Proactive Safety Culture” will therefore plan operations, discuss and assess hazards and risks prior to taking actions, enhance safe operations among workers, facilitate these operations to be performed in the same and aligned way: the safest way. Always!
Proactive measures are preventive actions taken to decrease the likelihood of an incident occurring, these measures also set in place techniques or procedures meant to mitigate the damage caused by the workplace accident.
Proactive monitoring simply means constantly attempting to identify potential issues before they create major challenges for your business. Since proactive monitoring anticipates issues, you can address these issues before an application crashes or performance degradation sets in.
Proactive hazard management from a high level is looking at your operations and identifying hazards that may affect operations. The objective is to ensure adequate control measures are implemented to: Prevent the hazard from manifesting itself into an unfavorable event; Detect the hazard to alert operations; or.
In the context of fire safety this would be a smoke detector sounding and the subsequent sprinkler system trying to put the fire out. These are what we call reactive safety features; they react to a certain trigger such as flames or smoke and alert you after the fact.
Proactive hazard identification methods - hazards are identified analysing systems' performance and functions for intrinsic threats and potential failures. The most commonly applied proactive methods are the safety surveys, operational safety audits, safety monitoring and safety assessments.
A proactive reporting strategy facilitates early identification, timely intervention, case management, accommodation, successful return to work and job retention. The management and all relevant stakeholders cooperate in establishing such a strategy.
You can measure health and safety success through pro-active health and safety activities. Such as health and safety inspections, near-miss reporting, health and safety culture, training achievements, good housekeeping and following the correct procedures.
A proactive approach focuses on eliminating problems before they have a chance to appear and a reactive approach is based on responding to events after they have happened. The difference between these two approaches is the perspective each one provides in assessing actions and events.
Rationale could include health and safety awareness, health and safety culture, early recognition of potential hazards and risks, less lost time accidents, more productivity. Equipment for air, noise, water, eye strain, etc.
(AK-tiv MAH-nih-ter-ing) A treatment plan that involves closely watching a patient's condition but not giving any treatment unless there are changes in test results that show the condition is getting worse.
Many incidents are preventable, as long as you take a proactive approach to health and safety. By putting in place a system to identify hazards and manage risks, you can prevent workplace injuries and diseases.
The IOSH Managing Safely risk assessment project is the practical section of the IOSH Managing Safely course. It tests your ability to apply what you've learned in a real-life situation. You're required to carry out a risk assessment of a workplace of your choice.
These Five steps to risk assessment can be followed to ensure that your risk assessment is carried out correctly: Identify the hazards. Decide who might be harmed and how. Evaluate the risks and decide on control measures.
A person who's reactive does things only in response to others. To react is to do something in response to something else. When someone pinches you, for example, you react. But if you're a reactive person, then you only react; you're always ready to react but not to act on your own.
The reactive effect refers to the effect that a researcher or assessor has on that which he or she is trying to study: subjects behave less naturally due to the fact that they are being studied.
A proactive person will be in more control of their lives because they do things in advance to influence a situation. For example, proactive police will try to prevent crimes before they happen whereas reactive police will only respond to crimes once they have been committed.
The definition of proactive is someone who takes an active role in dealing with something before it needs to be taken care of. An example of proactive is a student studying for a fall semester class during their summer vacation. (psychol.) Relating to or caused by previously learned behavior, habits, etc.
It means that you react to situations through your emotions. Here, you can often come across as blaming, resentful, insecure, or angry. Common statements made when someone is being reactive include: “It's just the way I am”, “There's nothing I can do”, “She ruined my day”, “The teacher wasn't fair”.
Reactive: Being reactive means you have the ability to handle pressure that comes your way in real time. Reactive leaders are also renowned for wanting to solve problems on their own and take the responsibility for it on their own shoulders.
And that is possibly one of the most useful advantages of being proactive, rather than reactive. Being proactive means that you will spend more time planning and preparing for the future than you will dealing with emergencies.
Generative: organisations set very high standards and attempt to exceed them. They use failure to improve, not to blame. Management knows what is really going on, because the workforce tells them. People are trying to be as informed as possible, because it prepares them for the unexpected.
What is a risk assessment? Risk assessment is a term used to describe the overall process or method where you: Identify hazards and risk factors that have the potential to cause harm (hazard identification). Analyze and evaluate the risk associated with that hazard (risk analysis, and risk evaluation).
Workers should be adequately trained on their equipment & gear to be able to: Work safely to avoid starting fires in the first place. Be able to put out small fires (sparks, smouldering, flareups, etc.) quickly so as to avoid the spread of fire into something much worse.
Reactive business strategies are those that respond to some unanticipated event only after it occurs, while proactive strategies are designed to anticipate possible challenges. Because no one can anticipate every possibility, no organization can be proactive in every situation.
Any company wishing to promote a “Proactive Safety Culture” will therefore plan operations, discuss and assess hazards and risks prior to taking actions, enhance safe operations among workers, facilitate these operations to be performed in the same and aligned way: the safest way. Always!
Reactive monitoring. Reactive monitoring is carried out when an incident has occurred. It involves: investigating accidents and incidents, including near misses. monitoring cases of ill-health and sickness absence records.
A proactive approach focuses on eliminating problems before they have a chance to appear and a reactive approach is based on responding to events after they have happened. The difference between these two approaches is the perspective each one provides in assessing actions and events.
A proactive person will be in more control of their lives because they do things in advance to influence a situation. For example, proactive police will try to prevent crimes before they happen whereas reactive police will only respond to crimes once they have been committed.
A SWOT analysis can be used for all sorts of decision-making, and the SWOT template enables proactive thinking, rather than relying on habitual or instinctive reactions.
Examples of proactive strategies include modifying task characteristics, reorganizing the physical setting, clarifying routines and expectations, revising the activity schedule, changing social interactions, providing more opportunities for choices, enhancing the predictability of the setting, and addressing ...
Proactive monitoring simply means constantly attempting to identify potential issues before they create major challenges for your business. Since proactive monitoring anticipates issues, you can address these issues before an application crashes or performance degradation sets in.
By. Any measure with the action of altering a response under examination. For instance, if a subject is aware of clinical observation, their reactions may be altered more by t he observer than the stimulus itself.
Proactive measures are preventive actions taken to decrease the likelihood of an incident occurring, these measures also set in place techniques or procedures meant to mitigate the damage caused by the workplace accident.
The Proactive Leading Indicators are offered by the International Social Security Association (ISSA) as a free supplementary tool for every enterprise and organization committed to VISION ZERO, be they advanced or beginner, large or small, local or international.
management is concerned with solving problems in response to one or more incidents. Proactive problem management is concerned with identifying and solving problems and known errors before further incidents related to them can occur again.
It means that you react to situations through your emotions. Here, you can often come across as blaming, resentful, insecure, or angry. Common statements made when someone is being reactive include: “It's just the way I am”, “There's nothing I can do”, “She ruined my day”, “The teacher wasn't fair”.
To react, to 'act back' on an event, is to respond by exerting the happening back on itself. Think of a few physical examples, like a rubber band 'reacting' to being stretched.Or a rubber ball 'reacting' to being thrown against the ground.
Introduction: My name is Aron Pacocha, I am a happy, tasty, innocent, proud, talented, courageous, magnificent person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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