Silver Lining Safety - Safety Bytes

If you don’t accommodate employees who’ve suffered work-related injuries, or you don’t engage employees in an interactive process when considering your obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a recent 3.3-million-dollar judgment against an employer in Illinois should be a warning.

I see too many employee injuries that result from pulling trash bags out of trash cans and throwing trash into dumpsters. In this podcast, I’ll review the problem and what you can do to eliminate these costly injuries from your workplace.

How often do you think about your emergency evacuation rendezvous locations? Too often we’re just focused on getting employees out of the building so we can account for them as quickly and accurately as possible. This podcast is focused on additional considerations for your evacuation meeting points.

The lockout/tagout standard, or the control of hazardous energy standard, requires periodic inspection.  Many employers believe this is just a review of their written lockout/tagout compliance program.  In reality, the periodic inspection required by OSHA must be much more in-depth.  This podcast will review the requirements of this inspection process.

Are employees in your company familiar with the phrase “lockout/tagout”? Do they think the terms are interchangeable? If so, we may have to clear up a misunderstanding. In this podcast, we’ll discuss whether tagout is permitted and if you should remove the word from your vocabulary.

Over the past 12 months, OSHA has begun to use drones to conduct workplace inspections. In this podcast, we’ll discuss OSHA’s process for the use of drones. We’ll also touch on your rights as an employer, as well as considerations for permitting the use of a drone during an OSHA inspection.

Over the last 20 years, businesses have moved their OSHA compliance training from classroom-based to training-supplemented with VHS or DVD video. Now there’s a big push to move to online training. What does OSHA think about that? I’ll talk about it in this week’s podcast.

As an employer, you have the right to require that OSHA obtain a warrant before they begin an inspection of your facility. Should you? This podcast will cover the pros and cons of requiring a warrant.

I’m often asked if I have suggestions for providing training on responding to incidents of workplace violence, including active shooters. While I can provide suggestions, I am always concerned about the physical injuries and psychological trauma that can arise from poorly constructed training. This webinar primary focuses on the potential harm from this training.

It’s great that you implemented an accident investigation program! Now what was the outcome of your investigation? Unfortunately, many times, blame falls on the employee. In this podcast, we’ll discuss situations in which employees were blamed for the accident, then we’ll focus on corrective actions that help improve the workplace rather than the employee.