706 Conducting a Job Hazard Analysis

Prepare to Conduct the JHA

Introduction

Involve Your Employees

Get together with your employees and talk about the actual and potential hazards and unsafe behaviors they believe might exist in their current work and surroundings. Discuss the possible accidents that might result from the hazards and behaviors. Next, come up with ideas to eliminate or control those hazards and behaviors. By the way, if you can eliminate or reduce hazards, don't wait until the JHA is conducted. Eliminate or reduce the hazard as soon as possible.

Employees are prone to use their "own" procedures when not being supervised.

It is very important to involve your employees in the JHA process because they have a unique understanding of the job, and this knowledge is invaluable for finding hazards. Involving employees will help minimize oversights, ensure a quality analysis, and get workers to "buy in" to the solutions because they've helped in some way to develop the procedures. If they are not involved in developing the JHA, they will not be as likely to "own" the safe job procedures. As a result, they may not want to use safe procedures and practices that they believe have been "imposed" on them.

The JHA Format

In this course we use a very simple process and format for developing a JHA. The table below shows the basic layout of the form we'll be using. We'll fill in the columns later as we cover each topic. You will see a great variety of JHA forms used by various companies. As you can see below, the JHA format includes the job description and three columns:

1. Basic Job Step
2. Hazards - Possible Injuries
3. Preventive Measures

Sample JHA Worksheet

Knowledge Check Choose the best answer for the question.