A Brief Note on Occupational Risk Management

Albert Kristein, Department of Civil Engineering and GeoResources, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, Email: albertkristein@ac.pt

Received: 27-Jul-2021 Published: 17-Aug-2021

Every employer’s duty is to take necessary measures to ensure the safety and health of his employees and people who may be affected by his instructions even though they are not his employees in the workplace.

The measures necessary to ensure the safety and health of persons at work include, providing and maintaining a safe environment, without risk to health, ensuring adequate safety measures are taken in respect of any machinery, equipment, plant, article or process used by his employees and employees are not exposed to hazards arising out of the arrangement, disposal, manipulation, organization, processing, storage, transport, working or use of thing under the control of the employer. Developing and implementing procedures dealing with emergencies that may arise while those persons are at work and ensuring that employees at work have adequate instruction, information, training and supervision as is necessary for them to perform their work. Every employer is required by the regulations, giving to people whom are not his employees the prescribed information about details in which he conducts his undertaking as this might affect their safety or health while those employees are at his workplace.

Occupational Health and Safety requires workers to comply with all safety and health standards that apply to their daily requirements on the job. Employees should follow the employer’s safety and health rules and use all necessary protective gears and equipments and follow safe work practices for the job directed by the employer. Employees should report all hazardous conditions to a supervisor or safety committee and report hazardous conditions to relevant authorities, if employers do not fix them.

Everyone in the workplace is to provide protection when required, any suitable protective tools, for his use alone or for use by him in common with others, for securing his safety, health while at workplace and to co-operate with his employer or any other person to such extent that will enable his employer to comply with the provisions of the Act. No employees at workplace shall wilfully or recklessly interfere with or misuse any appliance, protective clothing, convenience, equipment or other means or thing provided pursuant to any requirement under this Act for securing the safety, health of persons at workplace.

There might be some hazards in the working environment which are not obvious such as poor lightings, slippery floor and etc. Hence, Risk Management is crucial in all working environment. It allows the management to detect hazards early and taking all precaution to prevent accidents from occurring. There are 5 steps to perform risk management; looking for Hazard, decide who might be harm and how, decide on control measures, put control in place and review the controls.

Management can walk through the workplace and look for hazards in a systematic way looking at physical things and workplace activities, asking workers regarding hazards around them, conducting a safety audit and reviewing your workplace records such as sick leave and incident reports.

If a large numbers of employees in an organization are affected, performance of the organization will also be affected. Organizations will experience employees increasing absenteeism and decreasing commitment to work, impairing performance and productivity, unsafe working environment and damaging its image among its workers and externally. Organizations with such issues will not only affect its performance, it will also be less likely to succeed in a competitive market. Therefore, Human Resource Department needs to understand the importance of Work Stress in an Organization. Risk Management must be managed well in order to asses all possible risks in the working environment that have high possibilities causing damage to employees and the organization. The most effective method to find out the employees problems and why, is to question them directly as managers may have a different point of view from his employees about what are the causes of the problems.

There is a strategy to solve the issue which is crucial for employer to understand is to prevent the problems, foresees problems. Monitoring employees’ satisfaction and health regularly, ensuring employees know whom to talk to about their problems and having the ability to give them a helping hand in their problems, refer them to the right channel when they are experiencing real difficulties. Managers should do a follow up after a period of time and if necessary, revise your approach to work stress problems.

Preventive Activities are to prevent the same incident to occur and it can only be determined when direct and contributing factors have been identified. Solutions should be considered on its effectiveness and suitability to the company and its employees and is within the company’s budget. It is better to consider about alternatives before choosing a solution and to correct the process for a long term perspective instead of the short term.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that there is no area of interest.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to express his gratitude towards all the team members who participated in the research work.