H&S needs an independent expert to help management and labour work together
When Guy Chenard joined Lambton Generating Station as health and safety officer in 1999, the joint health and safety committee was struggling.
“It wasn’t a terrible committee, they were still one of the better ones,” he says. But everyone agreed the JHSC at Ontario Power Generation’s Sarnia-area facility wasn’t working the way it should and they set out to fix it.
One of the keys to a smoothly run joint health and safety committee is having an impartial expert available as a resource for the rest of the committee, says Chenard, of his role.
Usually committee members are busy just keeping up with daily job duties so it’s sometimes difficult to find time for JHSC responsibilities such as keeping up with legislative changes or researching and preparing for meetings, Chenard says.
The safety professional should continually be learning about workplace health and safety and therefore be up-to-date about changes and knowledgeable about best practices, he says. It is absolutely essential to be viewed as impartial.
The facility’s JHSC has 12 members, three representing management and nine others from two unions. As health and safety officer for the site, Chenard is represented by one of the unions but he attends the meetings as secretary and not as one of the committee members. This helps the other members view him as an impartial source for information and guidance.
Often what happens with committees is the co-chairs are seen as overly aggressive in pushing agendas for their sides, says Chenard. It’s up to the health and safety officer to guide them in the right direction and keep everyone focused on the larger goal of the committee — workplace safety.
Management and union representatives at Lambton Generating Station have worked to make the committee more efficient through better organized meetings, says Chenard.
It’s important, for example, for the committee to differentiate between health and safety, and labour issues.
“Before we send out an agenda, we ask people on the committee, ‘Do you have any concerns?’ They come to me and I gather that information and then we meet with the three co-chairs to decide if they are really health and safety issues.” If not, the co-chair goes back and explains to whoever raised the issue why it is not a matter for the committee.
“If it is, then it gets taken up at the meeting. We wanted to streamline our meetings and agendas,” says Chenard. At one point, three- and four-hour meetings weren’t unusual. But now they are kept to about two hours.
They also tried to streamline plant inspections, says Chenard. Because the plant is so big and it is difficult to inspect the entire workplace each month, the facility was divided into six sections. One section gets done each month so that the entire plant is reviewed twice a year.
And, a database was created for everyone on the committee to use to record observations. It allows them to create reports that go directly to management and easily make comparisons to earlier inspections.
“We never had a consistent method of going back and seeing what the inspection was like a year ago. Now we have it.”
Their efforts are starting to pay off, says Chenard. Management has a better sense of what the committee can and should be doing. It took about two years to make all the changes, but the committee, and Chenard, were recognized this year for the hard work, receiving Ontario Power Generation’s President’s Health and Safety Award.
“It wasn’t a terrible committee, they were still one of the better ones,” he says. But everyone agreed the JHSC at Ontario Power Generation’s Sarnia-area facility wasn’t working the way it should and they set out to fix it.
One of the keys to a smoothly run joint health and safety committee is having an impartial expert available as a resource for the rest of the committee, says Chenard, of his role.
Usually committee members are busy just keeping up with daily job duties so it’s sometimes difficult to find time for JHSC responsibilities such as keeping up with legislative changes or researching and preparing for meetings, Chenard says.
The safety professional should continually be learning about workplace health and safety and therefore be up-to-date about changes and knowledgeable about best practices, he says. It is absolutely essential to be viewed as impartial.
The facility’s JHSC has 12 members, three representing management and nine others from two unions. As health and safety officer for the site, Chenard is represented by one of the unions but he attends the meetings as secretary and not as one of the committee members. This helps the other members view him as an impartial source for information and guidance.
Often what happens with committees is the co-chairs are seen as overly aggressive in pushing agendas for their sides, says Chenard. It’s up to the health and safety officer to guide them in the right direction and keep everyone focused on the larger goal of the committee — workplace safety.
Management and union representatives at Lambton Generating Station have worked to make the committee more efficient through better organized meetings, says Chenard.
It’s important, for example, for the committee to differentiate between health and safety, and labour issues.
“Before we send out an agenda, we ask people on the committee, ‘Do you have any concerns?’ They come to me and I gather that information and then we meet with the three co-chairs to decide if they are really health and safety issues.” If not, the co-chair goes back and explains to whoever raised the issue why it is not a matter for the committee.
“If it is, then it gets taken up at the meeting. We wanted to streamline our meetings and agendas,” says Chenard. At one point, three- and four-hour meetings weren’t unusual. But now they are kept to about two hours.
They also tried to streamline plant inspections, says Chenard. Because the plant is so big and it is difficult to inspect the entire workplace each month, the facility was divided into six sections. One section gets done each month so that the entire plant is reviewed twice a year.
And, a database was created for everyone on the committee to use to record observations. It allows them to create reports that go directly to management and easily make comparisons to earlier inspections.
“We never had a consistent method of going back and seeing what the inspection was like a year ago. Now we have it.”
Their efforts are starting to pay off, says Chenard. Management has a better sense of what the committee can and should be doing. It took about two years to make all the changes, but the committee, and Chenard, were recognized this year for the hard work, receiving Ontario Power Generation’s President’s Health and Safety Award.
