Reference no: EM133480300

Occupational Health and Safety

You just started a new role as the Human Resources Manager for a manufacturing company employing 503 employees in a single facility. You lead a team of three HR Generalists and one safety supervisor.The safety supervisor has a split responsibility of reporting to both you, and to the Plant Manager.

From what you gather during your onboarding to your new job, the safety supervisor seems to spend a fair amount of time with managing the RTW program, by calling doctors, insurance companies, and tracking down employees that are in the program.You've also noted that the workforce in the plant is unionized and the employees seem engaged.The facility also has a functional Joint Health and Safety Committee that meet on a monthly basis.

From a financial perspective, the market the production plant serves is very competitive, and therefore, management continually scrutinizing costs at all levels throughout the organization....especially labour and overhead costs.So, needless to say, financial resources are limited.

Your observation of your new boss, the plant manager, is that he is quite stressed with the performance of the plant and doesn't seem to have time to dive deep into any one situation.Therefore, he is quite reliant on his subordinates to deliver results of their respective mandates.While you've observed that your plant manager has an excellent grasp of accounting principles and operational management strategies, you have an intuitive sense that you'll need to validate data when it comes to organizational behaviour, HR, and safety-related information that he passes along to you.

After two weeks of on-boarding and orientation, the Plant Manager has come to you with his concerns about 1) the increasing injury rates in the plant, 2) the increasing amount of premiums paid to WorksafeBC, and 3) the difficulties associated with getting injured employees to return to work on a timely manner.In your discussion with your boss, you've learned that the accident frequency rate has jumped from 1.89 to 8.45 in just one year, which unfortunately is bringing additional attention from both the corporate office, and WorksafeBC.You've also learned during your recent on-boarding that WorksafeBC has increased their site visits from once a quarter to once a month.

You've scanned the safety stats and you can't identify any repeatable patterns of a single type of injury to solely drive up the frequency rate, but noticed that there are a lot of first aid injuries that appear to be from, as the plant manager has said, "a lack of common sense."The plant manager has already asked you, "How do you correct behavior when the employees don't behave with common sense?".

The plant manager asked for your advice on how to improve safety performance, both now and long term, within the company. Your ideas are to be presented to the corporate executive team in one month in a one-hour meeting. You must focus on immediate and long-term organizational considerations and not simply transactional tasks. How do you get started?What measurements are important?What actions/programs/activities do you initiate in order to turn the safety performance around? .

Your writing and suggestions should not be based solely on what you think, but supported through research, benchmarking, and legislative investigation. Use current articles and BC legislation.

Please write a 9 to 11-page report, in APA format (Arial, 12 pt., double-spaced, indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inches) on how you would go about turning around the safety performance of this manufacturing plant. The report requires the use of BC rules and legislation and a minimum of 7 current (within 4 years) 5 scholarly, peer-reviewed, articles as references to support your strategies and arguments from Canadian sources. Only include the articles in your reference page, which are cited in your report.Follow APA format.

Use 7 scholarly, peer-reviewed, articles as reference to support your strategies and arguments.Include cover page, Table of Contents, Introduction (1 paragraph), body, conclusions, recommendations, and references.Please note the page count applies to the written portion of the report and not the cover page, table of contents, or reference list.