Podcast: Job Hazard Analysis Makeover -- 5 Crucial Steps

Trish and Traci, along with guest Valerie Stakes, discuss five steps to improve job hazard analysis (JHA) programs: honest program evaluation, form clarity, embedding JHAs in other documents, improved training and increasing visibility through collaboration.

Transcript

Welcome to Process Safety with Trish and Traci, the podcast that aims to share insights from past incidents to help avoid future events. Please subscribe to this free podcast on your favorite platform so you can continue learning with Trish and me in this series. I'm Traci Purdum, Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Processing and joining me as always, is Trish Kerin, Director of Lead Like Kerin. Welcome and happy New Year, Trish.

Trish: Happy New Year, Traci. So, great to be kicking off 2025 with you again.

Traci: Indeed, and today we have a guest. So, the first live podcast that we're doing, we have a guest with us. Valerie Stakes, safety engineer at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Val was a guest on this podcast several years ago, talking about the importance of safety literacy and making sure that the messages we're trying to communicate are understood by the audience we're sharing with them.

Thanks for joining us again, Val. I'm hoping you can give us a primer on what you do and how you do it.

Val: Thanks to you both for having me back. Well, happy New Year. I currently work for General Atomics Aeronautical. We are a defense contractor in Poway, California, where I am a senior safety engineer, and I do, as well as the rest of our team, a little bit of everything. From leading our safety training program. I am the safety engineer in charge of our engineering group and mentoring some of our newer team members. So, if there's ergonomic assessments, if there's something safety related, I do it.

Traci: Well, I appreciate you taking the time to join us today, and I'm looking forward to today's episode. And we're going to be focusing on job hazard analysis. And Val, you recently offered a workshop on effective ways to overhaul job hazard analysis programs. And Trish, I know some process safety activities use a JHA, and you've pointed out in the past that if they're just going through the motions, that there can be issues.

So, for our conversation today, I'm going to be using the five steps that Val outlined in her workshop and we can discuss them from both of your perspectives. Will that work for you guys?

Trish: Fantastic.

Val: Yes.

Take an Honest Look at your JHA and Review its Effectiveness

Traci: All right. And since this is your baby here, Val, with the five steps, I'm going to let you lead off each one and then Trish will come in and kind of give us her thoughts on it from a processing perspective. So, the first step that we're going to talk about is take an honest look at your program and review its effectiveness.

Val: So, a brief background on how I was inspired to put this together and have this as a proposal and then speak at ASSP in Denver this past year, I was tasked by my supervisor to come up with potentially a better way. My concern had been we have an entire library of job hazard analyses analyzing and looking at risk control for a whole series of tasks. And I wasn't sure if these were even in use.

So, I went and spoke to various managers and supervisors and did indeed find out that we often would write an analysis form and then we wouldn't necessarily do anything with it. So, they'd be written like a check in the box. So, that was one of the first things I did as far as hey, is our program even effective? Per CAL OSHA, per Fed OSHA, we are required to do hazard analysis, but what happens once you've done it?

Traci: And Trish, I know you and I have talked a little bit about the check and forget aspect of it. Do you want to talk a little bit about this first step of taking an honest look at the program and its effectiveness?

Trish: Yeah. So, this can be really quite challenging for an organization to do because it does require a lot of reflection and introspection into what you're doing. And for the leaders out there, as a leader effectively, how good are you at doing your job if you take a deep look and you find all these gaps? And so it can be quite frightening, I think, to take that honest look at the program.

But I would agree with Val that it is utmost importance that you need to do it. Because until you find those gaps, until you find where people are just sort of ticking it and forgetting and moving on, you can't fix them. And a true leader will be willing to learn and be humble enough to realize that everything's not perfect and we do need to get in and take a good look and fix things. Because ultimately at the end of the day, the piece of paper never saved anybody's life. It doesn't stop you. It's not a magic shield that protects you just because you have a JHA completed. You need to make sure that people are following them and are doing the work.

Val: Just to add on, when I was speaking with various leaders, there were so many supervisors, let alone just our floor shop employees didn't even know that these existed. We had this library, didn't know where to find it as far as where on our website. Didn't understand that this was something that was a living document because my first exposure to them was in the construction industry, which you did not start any given task before an activity hazard analysis. Same thing as a job hazard analysis was written and reviewed. So, we would start the day by pulling those documents that applied to the work that we were doing and reviewing them before the start of the day and working within this manufacturing facilities give the lack knowledge that this was even something we had was eye-opening.

Trish: Yeah, absolutely.

Review your JHA Form for Clarity and Ease of Use

Traci: I want to talk a little bit about, you bring up great points there that Trish brings up the visualization of it's not a magic shield. And Val, you bring up the point that people don't even know these things exist so that you have to give that exposure that they exist. But let's talk a little bit about your step number two of reviewing your JHA form for clarity and ease of use.

Val: There are so many different forms that are out, whether they're created in-house or people are Googling and looking them up and seeing like, hey, your JHA is only as good and effective as the form that you're using. So, it has to be easy to use. Having the ability to capture the job steps, having your hazards and then the controls. And then looking at it, it can be too wordy, it can be too easy. What works for the individual organization?

Traci: Trish, what are your thoughts on that?

Trish: Yeah. I think over my career, I've seen many iterations of JHAs and if I think back to the very first ones I saw, they were very simple, basic, almost just three columns. What are you doing? What are the hazards? What are you going to do about it? Basically. Pretty short, sharp, easy.

And then we got all excited about how we had to risk assess everything and all of a sudden, there were risk matrices put into JHAs and there were all sorts of other tables and we had to assess everything to the nth degree and put all that detail down to make sure that we covered all the hazards. And I think that detracted away from what the pure purpose was of stop and think about what you're doing and make sure we've got the controls in place. Because sometimes you don't need a detailed assessment to realize what the control needs to be. Sometimes the controls are really obvious and you don't need to go through the detailed assessment process.

So, I guess one of my concerns with JHA forms over the years is I think we've refined them and refined them and refined them to a point that they're now so complex and bureaucratic that people don't use them. Or they do put so much effort into doing the assessment that they don't follow through and implement the controls because well, they've done everything, haven't they? They've done the assessment. So, I think there's a balance to be struck between what you need people to focus on and what information you want in that document, versus going overboard and making it so onerous that people just avoid it or they do know where to find them eventually. They find them in the system, they print them off, they sign them. They haven't read them, they haven't added anything to them, they haven't updated them to make sure they're current for the job.

So, I think there's a balance that we need to strike here, and simplification is one of the hardest things to do. I think it was Winston Churchill that once said, "I would've written you a short letter, but I didn't have time. So, I wrote you a long one."

Val: Yes, I love that. And there are times where... We'll get to this. We need to teach people how to write them. This is not an inherently obvious process to do, which is why I like the concept of it isn't going to be AHS who writes them for you. We're going to partner with you, who is the person who's doing this task, who has the most information and education on it.

And you're looking at it. There might be one where I'm getting the entire job process written in one long paragraph, versus breaking it into manageable job steps with a hazard with each one, a control of each one. And just depending on who is using them...

Trish, you mentioned about including a risk matrix. That with something that I personally love having. The ones that I used on military job sites always had a risk matrix. We also included the hierarchy of control. So, having your engineering, your admin and even specify your personal protective equipment, having space for that.

Trish: Yeah, I think there's a balance around what works for your work group as well.

Val: And some people will include photos if it makes it easier.

Trish: I love that. I love the inclusion of photos because a lot of people are visual.

Val: Yes.

Trish: A lot of people aren't focused in their learning style on reading or writing. They want to see what good looks like. If we show them what good looks like, guess what? They can usually do it.

Find Opportunities to Pair or Embed JHAs into Other Documents

Traci: Excellent points there. And another good point, and kind of goes back to what you were talking about, Val, where people don't necessarily know that these documents are even in existence, is to find opportunities to pair or embed JHAs into other documents. That's your step number three. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Val: Yes. This is going back to where can I sneak in the vegetables and get my kids to eat them? Are there places or opportunities where you can embed a job hazard analysis into a document that might be used even more readily? And within our organization, we have standard operating procedures where that could be put in. There are things that are called technical orders. So, there are things that they already exist and I have an opportunity of, and by the way, as part of your SOP, we're going to put that safety part and you're not even going to notice that it's there. So, are there other that are pulled up on a more readily basis?

Trish: Yeah, I love that. Having the information where people need it in the documents that they're referencing for what they're about to do is the best way to, as you said, sneak in those vegetables. So, they're going to get that good dose of nutrition that they need without necessarily realizing that they've done it. And I think the more chances that we can find to slip in the useful information in ways that they're going to not only see but then absorb into what they're doing, I think that's going to be one of the big improvements we need to make in safety going forward.

Val: And you have an opportunity for easier buy-in because sometimes selling anything within environmental health and safety is time. So, here's the buy-in. The implementation, it's great. I can help you write this beautiful hazard document that once again gets saved into SharePoint and just lives there where, again, no one ever sees it. And here front and center, there's an opportunity for it to come out way more often.

Trish: The other thing I'd add in terms of tying them into other documents as well is also making sure that as you're developing them and embedding them, that we're taking into account in particular the human factor's aspect of the work that's being done to make sure that what we're expecting people to do... And a procedure review is a perfect time to do this because the procedures are defining how we want someone to do a task. Is it even possible? Is it possible to do it the way it's written or is that an ideal way that in the real job site doesn't work? So, making sure that we incorporate the human factors, I think, is also a really important part here.

Improve Content Through Training

Traci: And that kind of leads right into step number four that Val had here, improve content through training. And that, I'm assuming, takes those into account, the human factors. Val, you want to talk a little bit about that?

Val: And this is also an opportunity to update. Kind of going a little out of order here. I was thinking about the concept of them being the living documents and that, Trish, you just mentioned just a moment ago about that things can change. The process can change along the way. So, when are these things getting updated?

And during a training session is an opportunity right there. So, the better or the more that we train our employees, the better, more usable documents. So, not necessarily prettier or more technical, but we have a better chance of them being used. Are they trained to do so? So, I'll use an example of sometimes these will be required as part of a corrective action after an incident investigation. And then we're asking those who are doing whichever task that, okay, please write this JHA for this process. Well, you've just handed a document that maybe someone's never seen and also asked that person to write this. And we don't want to do it. I don't do that job. I want this to come from you, but I'm going to train you to do it. So, do they even know why JHAs are used, let alone how to write an effective risk control document?

Trish: Yeah. I remember years ago in a role, one of the things we used to do is our operating teams, they had a training day as part of their routine shift cycle. And one of the most common things that we'd spend time with them on their training day was taking a particular procedure and doing that very thing of working through going, so how would we do it? And let's go through step by step. And does that step make sense or have we got that wrong?

And it was a brilliant opportunity to improve the quality and usability of the procedures and the risk assessment material going into them, so the JHAs. And get to a point where we had very effective documentation that the operators had been deeply involved in developing, and so they had ownership on it. But we also had their expertise going into creating it. And if we had an issue where we weren't quite sure whether what they were doing was technically correct and could have led to an issue, that's when you bring in your subject matter experts and you talk through it. And it may well be that we need to provide feedback and education to the operating group around why it must be done in this order. Even though it may not quite sound logical to you, there's a reason for it. Here's what the reason is.

Because when people understand why they have to do something in a certain way, they're more likely to do it in that certain way. If they don't understand why, they'll find the simplest way to them to do it. And so making sure that we've got all of those aspects laid out.

So, I agree. You've got a great opportunity when you're doing training to really engage and produce high quality... And you're right, not in terms of it doesn't have to look pretty, but high quality in terms of usability of the document and accuracy of the document, which is what it comes down to because they're the things that are going to make a difference on whether people do the job how it is expected or do the job in a completely different way.

Val: Yeah, they're not writing them to please us, again, to check that box. And what I think that the exercise of teaching someone to write these and going through it together, like having a combination of frontline employees, supervisors, it really focuses in on developing their hazard recognition skills. Like, wow, I didn't realize that was unsafe. Now we do.

Trish: Yeah, absolutely. That's often what do here. It's the oh, I didn't know I had to do it that way because of that. Oh, if I had a known. Yeah, I didn't know that was unsafe. I didn't know that was a problem. So, yeah, you're right. That realization, and when they come to that realization, that's also really powerful learning anchor in their mind to hold onto that learning too.

Increase Visibility and Buy-In Through Collaboration

Traci: We're going to get to the last step now, ladies, increase visibility and buy-in through collaboration. And I think we've been leading up to this of getting these documents in the hands and in front of them and making them understand them. So, Val, let's talk a little bit about your buy-in through collaboration theory there.

Val: So, again, depending on your organization, there are so many opportunities where these can be created for the first time, reviewed and so forth. So, going through, I mentioned incident investigations. We also have a near miss good catch. Program so that both of them, updates of existing, creations of new ones. We have a safety newsletter where I have promoted like, hey, this is what we've written so far. Do you have any ideas for one? And that leading even into safety committees. So, we've used that as an opportunity to write them together. So, I bring this up at least once a year. I get to have safety committees for two groups each quarter.

And then also, as I increasingly get to know all of the business leaders in my groups is being able to incorporate JHAs into pre-task meetings. Like hey, can I come in? Can we talk about this? This is a great opportunity for us. We're kicking off a new anything. Do you think this is an opportunity for us to capture the job steps, the hazards and the controls of what we're about to do?

Trish: I think that collaboration and that buy-in is just so valuable. And one of the challenges that we see more so in the process safety sphere is because a lot of the controls and a lot of the focus still remains very clearly within the engineering sphere. So, we have people focused, the engineers focused on getting it right, designing it right, building it right, maintaining it right, but at the end of the day, they're not the people that are operating it. We still need it operated in the right way.

But also more importantly, the operators are the ones that understand how it works as opposed to how the process should work in theory. And so it's really important to get that buy-in and ask for feedback. But even more important than asking for feedback from people is you have to listen to their feedback. And that can sometimes really be the blocker that people are begrudgingly asked for their feedback, but we have no intention of paying any attention to it. And that's a problem because people see that as disingenuous and they're not going to tell you what you need to know.

When you ask people for feedback, you need to genuinely be open to listening to what they tell you and genuinely considering whether you need to change what you're doing on the basis of that feedback. And you may not always need to change it, and that's okay as well, provided you give people feedback as to why you're not changing it. So, this feedback loop is part of communication. Communication should be two-way. If I'm going to ask you a question, I need to listen to your answer. I need to consider your answer before I continue.

And sometimes we forget some of that simple language aspect of what we do to make sure that we can get that buy-in and collaboration because you will see amazing results when you genuinely ask someone for their opinion on a piece of work that they're doing and take it into account. And if you don't agree with it, then give them feedback why you don't agree with it. So, they don't just feel ignored. They will then know that okay, you haven't taken it for these reasons. Okay, I can accept that and I move on to something else. So, I think it's really powerful to do that well.

Traci: Trish, do you have anything to add on this topic?

Trish: I think for me it's just around encouraging you all to take a deep dive into these five steps that Val's proposed, because I think they're incredibly valuable and you will see some remarkable outcomes if you take the time and the courage to go through and take that honest look and do a deep review. Take that time because you will get better outcomes.

You will not only get better safety outcomes though. You'll also get more efficient outcomes in productivity in what you're doing. So, this is a win-win for both safety and productivity in the workplace as far as I'm concerned. I'd encourage you all to take the opportunity. At the start of the year if you're looking at how you're going to improve some of your safety outcomes throughout the year, this is a good place to start for one of them, I think. One of your strategies.

Val: Traci, just adding on that the audit that I did of our program was quite revealing and seeing that in addition... Our form could be improved, that the understanding and the recognition of what we had that was... Even though we were working so hard within our department, it just showed that there was so much room for improvement within our organization.

Traci: Well, Trish and Val, I appreciate the time you took today in helping us with some good tips of how to sneak the vegetables in. Unfortunate events happen all over the world, and we will be here to discuss and learn from them. Subscribe to this free podcast so you can stay on top of best practices. You can also visit us at chemicalprocessing.com for more tools and resources aimed at helping you run efficient and safe facilities. On behalf of Trish and Val, I'm Traci, and this is Process Safety with Trish and Traci. Thank you again.

Trish: Stay safe.

Val: Thank you so much.