Improving safety and health in the workplace is a constant priority in the hospitality industry, but it can be an uphill battle. Talking with your frontline employees is a great way to bring important issues and concerns about things happening on-property to light, and a workplace safety committee creates a forum for that dialogue to take place on a regular basis.
A well-organized safety committee collaborates to generate ideas for improving safety and health, inform and educate employees on safe practices, and stimulate employee interest and involvement in the safety function. If you don’t yet have a program like this in place—or if your workplace safety committee could do with a little reinvention—here is some guidance to help you get started.
Why Form a Workplace Safety Committee?
At this time, there is a patchwork of state regulations and recommendations regarding workplace safety committees, with 14 states currently recommending that employers convene one. The state of Pennsylvania takes that one step further by offering a discount to employers on their workers compensation if they have an active safety committee. Per the PA Department of Labor, committees must be in operation for six full consecutive calendar months including conducting monthly meetings and maintaining agendas, attendance lists, and minutes for each meeting before employers are eligible to apply for this discount.
Regardless of where your property is located and what the specific guidelines and recommendations are in your area, a safety committee is an important tool for improving safety and health in the workplace. Effective safety committees help organizations to maintain their focus on injury trends and potentials, communicate and address safety suggestions and concerns from all areas of the organization and serve as positive safety role models throughout the entire organization.
Who Should Join?
When building a workplace safety committee from the ground up, the first and most important thing to determine is who is going to be involved with the committee. An often-misguided notion is that only property management and leadership should be involved in this kind of initiative. In practice, workplace safety committees need to be comprised of a range of team members, from the general manager to hourly workers. Every role on the property that is involved with day-to-day operations needs to be represented, including directors, supervisors, managers, and regular line employees. Ideally, the committee should be comprised of roughly 50 percent management, 50 percent hourly non-management employees.
While there is no magic number of committee members, the size of your committee should be determined by the size of your facility. Simply put, if you have a single property with a small workforce, your safety committee will naturally be smaller than that of a resort with over 1,000 employees. Ensuring that every department and each location on the property is represented by one person from leadership and one hourly employee is a good rule of thumb for providing an adequate range of perspectives and experiences while keeping the committee small enough to remain effective.
How Should It Be Structured?
The goal of the safety committee is to get input from all levels across the organization. Therefore, the committee should be organized in a way that will get all members on the same page and give them each an opportunity to bring forward safety issues from within the property. Committee meetings should be held monthly to discuss any losses that have occurred or new trends that have emerged since the previous meeting and to consider any upcoming events or activities that may raise specific safety concerns.
Begin by advising new committee members of their roles and responsibilities and setting some goals. Meetings should be organized to involve everyone and foster healthy communication, and procedures should be put in place to document your committee’s work and follow up on recommendations. A discussion-based format is preferable to lecture-style meetings; if you hold a safety committee meeting and the person who's leading it just reads safety materials aloud and then says “OK, go tell your teams,” your committee will not be effective. An open forum for discussion is a much better format to encourage dialogue and enhance the impact and the substance of your meetings.
What Should Be Accomplished?
An agenda will help ensure that each meeting is organized (and as an added bonus, will make it easier to take notes on the session). Each monthly agenda should include a review of accident trends on property, including general liability, guest liability or workers compensation issues, as well as a look at any upcoming events that could trigger the need for extra safety precautions with the staff. Time should also be allotted for suggestions from the employee base, including observations passed along by individuals who don’t serve on the committee.
If a major incident has taken place since the last meeting, an accident review should be conducted to ensure identification and remediation of root causes. Questions that should be asked and answered by the committee include:
- Were the right tools and equipment available and in good condition?
- Were the right work methods and procedures used?
- Was the worker adequately trained for that specific job?
- Did any “environmental” factors contribute?
- What factors drove the employee decision just before the incident?
- Was an accident report filed?
Keeping accurate minutes from each meeting is important, both for documentation of what has been accomplished as well as to track assignments and next steps. As a best practice, it is always ideal to review the minutes from the previous session as the first agenda for each subsequent meeting.
A Team Effort
The way your workplace safety committee defines success will be unique to your organization, but metrics will likely include the competence and dedication of its members, the committee’s ability to define and support goals and objectives, and a culture of open communication, mutual trust, respect and support.
As risk management partners to our insureds, we regularly work closely with our hospitality clients on the nuances of developing and maintaining workplace safety committees and other safety initiatives. Ask your insurance carrier how they can support you in your own health and safety efforts.
Andrea Ball is AVP, senior risk control casualty specialist and Andrew Luttrell is senior risk control casualty specialist, at Sompo North America.