Safety is a vital part of the construction industry. Your construction company has to put measures in place to ensure the safety of workers at the construction site. This requires you to implement the Job Safety Analysis (JSA), which ensures all workers observe all the stipulated safety measures.

Here is everything you need to know about JSA, and why it’s important to the construction industry.

What is JSA?

JSA, or Job Safety Analysis, is a step-by-step procedure that splits each job into manageable training tasks, identifies the safety components in each task, and trains employees on how to avoid safety hazards.

Job safety analysis pinpoints specific areas that have potential safety risks and helps you keep your workers safe. It also helps your company become compliant with safety guidelines thus reducing your employee turnover and instilling trust in your customers. JSA is sometimes referred to as Job Hazard Analysis or JHA.

How job safety analysis works

Job safety analysis works by deconstructing jobs into simple tasks and analyzing the safety concerns in each task. It requires you to compile a JSA report using a series of steps. These steps make fulfilling JSA requirements quick and easy.

Once the report is complete, you can train your employees on laid down safety procedures and make sure they stay safe. This will greatly reduce the risk of injuries during construction.

What are the steps in a job safety analysis?

Since a job safety analysis is a step-wise procedure, there are five steps to get a successful JSA.

Choose a job to analyze

An effective job safety analysis starts by identifying a job and noting the hazards and injuries associated with it. It is important to point out the hazards before they occur. You will need to perform a job safety analysis on every task done on the construction site.

There may be several tasks to be accomplished and a limited time to analyze the safety hazards in each of them. It is important to prioritize the jobs to analyze first using the criteria below:

• Accident frequency: You need to perform a job safety analysis on tasks that are prone to accidents or illnesses.
• Accident severity: Jobs with fatal or near-fatal accidents need immediate safety attention. They include jobs with high risks of falling from great heights, handling hazardous materials, or risky machinery.
• Jobs prone to human error: These are tasks that have complex written instructions, or where one simple human error can cause injury, permanent disability, or death.
• New jobs: Jobs that are new to your operation or that have undergone changes in processes and procedures need to undergo a job safety analysis to determine their necessary safety procedures.

Identify job site needs and break down jobs into tasks

After you choose the job to analyze, you will need to break it down into a series of tasks that need to be accomplished for the job to be done. You need to list each task from the beginning of the job to the end.

An example of a job is hoisting construction materials to a high floor using a crane. This job can be broken down into several tasks as follows:

• Preparing for the job by collecting the equipment you need.
• Turning on the crane.
• Loading the building materials to be carried by the crane.
• Turning off the machine.
• Cleaning up.

This may seem like a laborious process to complete for every job on the site but it is crucial for analyzing the risks associated with using a crane. It will let you compile the safety measures needed and PPEs associated with the job. It is vital to analyze each of the steps that make up a job and get a full picture of any hazards that could occur before they do.

Identify the hazards and risks

This is the main aim of a job safety analysis. Once you’ve determined the steps required to complete a task, you can see the risks in each step. It is important to examine the entire environment to determine the existence of any possible hazard. This means that dangers exist in the task being performed and in the environment in which they are performed.

When assessing hazards, you need to determine the risk and degree of injury associated with each safety hazard. You can do this by addressing the following questions:

• What type of hazard is present?
• What is the level of risk in this safety hazard?
• What is the probability of this hazard occurring?
• Can this hazard cause injury?
• If yes, how severe can the injuries get?

To get answers to these questions, you can consult employees with extensive field experience. Some professionals use software for risk assessment to determine the levels of risk with each task.

Develop preventive measures and residual risk.

This step involves you coming up with ways to prevent the hazards that you previously outlined. This involved documenting any personal protective equipment needed and measures to mitigate the risks involved with a job.

Once these are taken into account, you need to conduct another risk assessment of each task to find any residual risk or amount of risk remaining. This can be achieved by using the methods you used before to determine the initial risks.

If you see that you cannot eliminate risks, you can try to change the job procedure to limit the risks as much as possible. This includes providing Safety Data Sheets or SDSs that give information on safety protocols and give details on a possible hazard.

Once all risks and residual risks have been compiled, you will be able to determine the overall risk associated with a job. This information will help you identify the jobs that pose the biggest risks to your workers even with preventive measures.

The data collected on this exercise will help you see if additional preventive measures are necessary to further reduce the risk of injury.

Compile a job safety analysis report

Once you complete a job safety analysis, it is important to compile, document, and share your findings with your employees in a report. Every worker associated with the job must be made aware of the risks associated with it and the measures they should take to ensure their safety.

The report should be accessible to every worker and easy to understand. When an employee is training for a specific job, the JSA report associated with the task should be given to them.

The company should confirm that the worker has read and understood the report. This will ensure that the employee knows what to do to avoid injury and provide accountability in case of any incident.

Why is Job Safety Analysis important?

A successful JSA ensures consistent and safe work methods. The safety measures stipulated by a job safety analysis make the job site safe for workers and site visitors. It also makes employees feel confident while working because they know all the risks associated with their jobs.

It reduces the risk of injuries to construction workers by helping them know how to best perform a task without the risk of injury. A JSA form provides official documentation that regarding an employee’s knowledge of the safety protocol associated with a job.  

Why do construction companies need JSA?

Construction companies need job safety analysis more than any other industry because of the many safety and health hazards at construction sites. Here are reasons construction companies need JSA:

Meet safety standards and avoid lawsuits

A job safety analysis lets companies meet safety standards stipulated by the Occupational Health and Safety Industry. In addition to keeping your workers safe, a JSA makes your company compliant with national safety standards and helps you avoid negative legal and financial repercussions.

Clear communication

A JSA helps construction companies improve communication through multiple levels of leadership. This is because it needs input from representatives in multiple levels of your employee team.

The review and comment process allows the company to have open communication and get feedback from all its employees. It also lets the company see any safety issues they may have overlooked.

Helps train new employees

Job safety analysis helps train new employees. When you hire a new worker, you need to orient them to the job as soon as possible. A JSA is a quick way to get a new employee accustomed to all your safety procedures. This will greatly reduce human error due to inexperience because of the teaching aids created by the JSA process.

The company can avoid hazardous conditions

A job safety analysis lets a construction company avoid dangerous work conditions as much as possible. It prevents accidents on a construction site. While OSHA standards help avoid many dangerous incidents, they are not enough to avoid every potential hazard on the work location.

Using mobile forms for JSA

The job safety analysis mobile form is designed for construction companies. It covers wide aspects of safety procedures on construction sites, including personal protective equipment, safety training, and machinery safety. The construction safety analysis can be customized to suit your unique company needs.

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