Regardless of the size of your business, NY business insurance is just one small part of a risk management program. We have previously discussed the importance of an injury and illness prevention program. Now we will dig deeper to look at the significance of safety committees to the prevention programs. Your employees will appreciate a safety committee and so will your bottom line.

Make a safety committee an integral part of the culture at your NY business. Your employees will appreciate it, and your bottom line will benefit as well.

A safety committee is a group of employees from the same company who meet regularly to promote mutual interests between management and employees to create and maintain a safe and healthy workplace. These members maximize available resources and information regarding safety and health efforts and issues.

Ultimately, the safety committee seeks to reduce risk, have a positive effect on the loss experience of the company and contribute to the well-being of the workforce.

There are certain duties that safety committee members must do to ensure success. These duties should be done regularly so that a company always knows what its safety issues are.

Here are some of the key duties of the safety committee:

• Identify exposures and areas of safety concern. This can be done through inspections and by talking to employees.
• Develop an incident reporting procedure.
• Review incident investigation reports to verify that action was taken and to prevent recurrence.
• Provide safety training and education to employees.
• Keep company safety and health rules and procedures up to date.

A safety committee will be successful if these tasks are done regularly. For example, the safety committee should inspect and evaluate exposures and areas of safety concern on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Management and committee members must also jointly agree on frequency and meeting agendas, how inspectors will be trained, communication with staff on safety initiatives and how progress will be tracked.

Safety committees should be made of management and staff members from various departments in the business. You want employees to “buy-in” as opposed to mandating membership of the committee. These employees will then be motivated instead of feeling forced to do the work. Experience shows that the ideal committee size is 6 members, but smaller organizations can have success with just a few members.

At The Murray Group, we have regular discussions with our partners on the importance of safety committees. It is usually a recommendation as part of our LiveSECURE 365™ process with our business partners. Even families can learn from this though as it is critical that family members understand home safety and what to do in the case of an emergency.

If you would like to discuss safety committees further with The Murray Group, please contact any member of our team at (518) 456-6688.

Live Secure,

Ryan Murray, VP, CIC