I believe they call a headline like that, “Click Bait”. The odd fact is, it is true, to a degree. At the risk of giving away the punchline, they just want to see that you and your team are making the effort to have a safe and healthy workplace.
So, how do you show a Work Safe BC inspector that your brewery is making the effort? In simple terms, you hand them your “Work Safe” inspection book. In its most simple form it will contain a tab for “Current Issues”, and another for “Completed Issues”. I coach my clients to have a number of other tabs, but they are not the immediate focus, let’s start small. As an example, I usually have a map inside the front cover with the route from the brewery to the nearest hospital.
I start with an Excel sheet with a few columns, Date; Issue; Notes; Status. Again, keeping this system as simple as possible so that your people might actually start and continue to do this. You can later add whatever columns you consider important, many come to mind for me but let’s start small. Also, don’t crowd too much into the project, these are just Work Safe items, as an example, ignore fire extinguishers, that is a different inspection process and most brewers have contracts for that sort of thing.
One or two staff should do an initial walk-through, and if you were my client, I would be there for that. You are creating a list of deficiencies in your workplace, just write them down. On your first pass, do not try to find everything, you will not. However, be honest and thorough but be sure to find some simple fix items, these are your “low hanging fruit”. A pile of extension cords, a little drain grate missing off the floor, things that are easy to fix and can quickly be moved to the Completed Issues tab. Do not fix these small items as you find them, write them down, you will be fixing them shortly.
Transfer that list of Current Issues to the Excel spreadsheet, as I have described above. “Filter” on the Status column which should all be “Open” at this time. Now send somebody to complete the low hanging fruit items, making notes about how it was done, who did it, etcetera. Eg. Pile of extension cords: untangled, cleaned and wrapped cords. Installed hooks on the wall for them to hang. Continue through any other Issues that can be easily and effectively completed. Now, return to your Excel sheet and change the status from Open, to Closed. Filter your sheet to select only those items that are Open, print that page. Change your filter to select only those items that are Closed, print that page. Put the page of open items behind that tab in your Work Safe inspection book and the Closed items behind the next tab.
Congratulations, you now have a functional, though rudimentary Work Safe inspection book. They legislate that these inspections must occur monthly, but that should be stated differently. No more than one month should pass between the last entry in the inspection book and “today”. Here’s the trick, your staff should be trained to look for unsafe issues, Current Issues in your spreadsheet. They should simply write them on to the Current Issues page in the book. Your month resets and starts running again after each entry, so with a little bit of use and input from involved staff, at the end of a month you should have several more Current Issues and several more Completed Issues. Again, enter them onto your Excel sheet and filter as noted above, then reprint your pages. Some of my clients keep the old pages others throw them away. I am a throwaway kind of guy.
If Work Safe appears on your doorstep to perform an inspection, the first thing you do is hand them your Work Safe inspection book. Explain how it works, “These are the things that are currently outstanding, and these are the things that have been completed.” Explained that any handwriting on the page is your staff contributing to the Work Safe effort at your brewery. Obviously, if you have some egregiously dangerous items on your Open list, I would urge you to get them sorted out or in the very least have explanations in the Notes section about the efforts that have been ongoing to resolve the issue.
As I noted above, this is a very rudimentary version of a Work Safe inspection book, but it is much better than not having anything when Work Safe BC walks onto your production floor.
Now the sales speech. I do this for a living and have done it for breweries since 2015. If you want help getting it started, call me, or send me an email. I do not charge you unless I have made it clear that my time is billable.
My next posting will be about your MSD Book that Work Safe BC mandates you must have on premises.