Safety Management: A Guide for Facility Managers, Second Edition

Book Preface

Safety is both a people and an environmental issue. It involves people and productivity and the costs of managing each. It involves coordinating policies and operations with industry standards and practices as well as with government regulations.

This new, 2nd edition of Safety Management: A Guide For Facility Managers, is written for facility managers and other professionals who want to provide a safe and accessible environment for employees, students, patients, customers and all other people who enter their facility.

The key to reducing safety and health hazards is an effective safety management program. In turn, the cornerstone of a successful safety
management program is management commitment and employee involvement— forming a team that more and more often includes the facility manager as an integral player.

Like the first edition of this book, Safety Management focuses on managing the safety function. It provides the reader with a greater understanding of safety and health issues, including liability. It also enables the readers to better carry out their responsibilities in ensuring a safe working environment.

While the primary audience of Safety Management: A Guide for Facility Managers, 2nd ed., is the facility manager, other professional including safety compliance officers, risk managers, human resources managers and supervisors at all levels can also benefit from its contents—as both a learning tool and as a reference.

Introduction

SAFETY: THE OPPORTUNITY AND THE CHALLENGE
Facility managers are the professionals most responsible for integrating people with their physical environment. As such, they often find themselves facing a myriad of complexities and challenges.

Among these complexities is the issue of safety, along with the concomitant challenges of accelerating regulatory activity, OSHA inspections,
soaring workers’ compensation costs, increased employee litigation, the Americans with Disabilities Act and violence in the workplace. Each of these challenges requires greater effort on the part of employers in identifying, correcting and preventing safety and health hazards.

Awareness and proactive management can turn the challenges into opportunities—and a more productive workforce that works with management to ensure a safe working environment. Safety Management: A Guide For Facility Managers, 2nd ed. addresses the complexities, opportunities and challenges of safety in detail, explaining how to systematically identify, evaluate and prevent general and specific hazards.

Each chapter of this new edition addresses a key area of safety management. Chapter 1 for example, provides a summary of the statistics that affect employers and the workforce. The most currently available data is presented and should be considered within the context of the shared responsibilities of employers and employees in preventing accidents and injuries.

Chapter 2 discusses the rights and responsibilities of both the employer and employee. Chapter 3 addresses the Whistleblower Act and its impact upon both employers and employees. Other chapters talk about violence in the workplace, ADA compliance, conducting the safety audit, recordkeeping, safety inspections and change management. Safety Management, the 2nd edition covers in detail several major aspects of safety and health management that are either not well-covered, or simply not covered at all by many texts.

Chapter 8, for example, discusses the written safety plan in detail and contains a sample written hazard communication program. Each element of the hazard communication program safety plan is explained, providing readers with the means to adapt the sample plan to their own particular organization.

At the core of this 2nd edition is the recognition that corporations and other organizations have a moral, ethical and legal responsibility to provide a safe environment for all people who enter their facilities.