Orlando, FL — Although OSHA stays largely a regulatory and enforcement company, it’s lately began prioritizing safety culture.
Why?
“It’s where the rubber meets the road on how organizations live in the real world,” Andrew Levinson, director of OSHA’s Directorate of Standards and Guidance, mentioned Monday throughout a presentation on the 2024 NSC Safety Congress & Expo. “We recognize that we can’t get what we need out of safety and health programs without talking about safety culture.”
OSHA is once more focusing on safety as a core worth. (It was additionally the theme of company chief Doug Parker’s keynote presentation on Tuesday.)
Agency efforts geared toward reinforcing the thought embody the launch of the Come Home Safe video collection, which appears at workplace fatalities and the folks affected by them.
“When we talk about safety,” Levinson mentioned, “it’s not usually what’s going on in the workplace that motivates people. It’s ‘I want to get home to my wife, to my kids, to my husband, to my parents or to my loved ones.’ There are some really gut-wrenching stories. The statistics matter, but they’re not the story.”
In addition, OSHA is growing a management toolkit on safety culture and beginning “Safety in 5” – primarily a collection of toolbox talks.
“There are a lot of industries that don’t use that term (toolbox talks),” Levinson mentioned. “We’re hoping to build out a library of hundreds of these.”
During the session, Levinson additionally supplied a number of regulatory updates. It’s a “safe bet,” he mentioned, that OSHA will lengthen its remark interval deadline (Dec. 30) for its proposed rule on warmth sickness prevention.
He added that the company’s proposed guidelines on infectious ailments, tree care and workplace violence in well being care and social settings may seem in 4 to 6 months, on the earliest.
