training

4 Reasons for Accident Prevention on Your Jobsite

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accident prevention

Safety is what we do. We work to match companies to safety professionals after getting to know the unique needs of our clients.

In our experience it’s been proven that employing high quality safety professionals is the best accident prevention. Besides the tragic outcome of an injury, illness, or even death, accidents have a huge impact on your business. It is in your best interest to make sure that the people working for you are well-trained and experienced so that an accident doesn’t happen on your watch.

Why? Here’s four reasons. 

  1. Protect life and health. The most obvious reason is that preventing destruction of life and health is our primary concern as safety specialists. This is a moral obligation for the health and well-being of our employees. In fact, we believe that failing to take precautions to predict accidents and occupational injuries or illnesses makes management morally responsible for those accidents. If a potential problem or threat exists, and no action steps are taken to prevent an accident, the outcome will fall on you.
  2. Prevent downtime. The second reason for preventing accidents is because accidents and occupational illnesses limit efficiency and productivity because of downtime. This is an indirect cost from an accident, but a very costly one. Replacement labor can cost your company time and resources, along with possible sick pay, repairing damaged equipment, or even OSHA fines.
  3. Protect your reputation. The third reason for preventing accidents is because accidents and occupational illnesses can produce far-reaching social harm to your reputation. Word gets around when accidents happen and it always paints a negative picture of a company in the public eye. We’ve always said that your clients will only think as much of you as they think of your safety personnel. Sending unprepared employees to a job will hurt your reputation because you will be sending them the wrong message about your company. With the right safety staff, you can send a message that says “We take safety and the lives our employees seriously! We do our best in everything.”
  4. Prevent OSHA violations. The fourth reason for preventing accidents is because state and federal legislation mandates management responsibility to provide a safe workplace, so his is a legal requirement. OSHA violations could cost you thousands of dollars a day. Even the most unintentional violation can cause serious harm to your company.

We believe having well-trained, high quality, experienced safety professionals on a job site is the best way to go for accident prevention. The lives of your employees, your reputation, and your bottom line are all at stake, but they will be in good hands with ResponsAble safety professionals on site. Give us a call at 225-753-1909 to talk with us about your upcoming projects.

Quality Safety Personnel: Get Access to Our Continuously Growing Database

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Continuously Growing Database

Just last week I got a call from a client in Ohio that needed safety personnel for job at a refinery to start immediately, just as soon as we could work out the logistics.

Most of the calls that we get from clients are safety managers that need people on the site within days (more like yesterday). Not only do they need someone to fill the role quickly, but they need a high quality safety professional- someone who has been trained, meets set expectations, is certified, qualified, has passed drug tests and background checks, and can start immediately.

Luckily, we have enough people in our database that we can meet this need quickly and match high quality safety professionals to clients that really needed them yesterday.

Set a Higher Standard for Your Hiring Processes

When you’re pressed for time and you need to fill positions quickly to ramp up for a job, don’t hire just anyone; it’s not worth the risk. As tempting as it may be to make the fast and easy hires, it’s better for you to be picky in the selection of your safety professionals.

When you make desperate hires (untrained, unexperienced people) in a time crunch, you send a negative message to your employer that can be damaging to your reputation. You do not want to put untrained, unexperienced safety professionals on a worksite, as it will inevitably create worksite issues and an unsafe environment.

Get Access to Our Stream of Qualified Safety Personnel

When you hire ResponsAble to take over your safety hiring process, you get access to a continually growing pool of highly qualified safety professionals. Our safety professionals stay consistently employed so they stay sharp in their training and skill level. We don’t supply you with just warm bodies; we have a ready pool of trained and reliable safety personnel that have years of experience.

Our hiring process includes:

  • Full background checks & drug testing
  • Ranking to check skill levels and specialties.
  • Ongoing training, certification and development to improve each individual’s fit with more positions and companies.

Hire a Safety Staffing Specialist that Recruits & Trains Around the Clock

ResponsAble Safety Staffing works around the clock, continuously recruiting, training, and adding highly qualified safety personnel to our team. We do this year round to acquire a pool of qualified safety personnel to match them to employers. We never stop searching for the best of the best to send to our clients.

This continuously growing database of talent is an ongoing stream for companies like yours that need safety staff to ramp up new jobs quickly:

  • Temporary ramp up for quick turnarounds
  • Expansion Projects
  • Interim Positions

We are the Safety Staffing Specialists

Our safety personnel are better screened, trained, and more experienced because we are 100% focused on safety staffing. This benefits you in upholding a professional image and reputation, fewer hassles, and a safer job site. We can give you all this on demand, from an ever-growing database of quality safety professionals.

You may not have time to seek out highly qualified safety professionals in a time crunch, but we do. In fact, we don’t have to find them. We already have them, and they’re ready to go. Contact us today to learn how to outsource your safety staffing with us, the safety staffing experts. Give us a call at 225-753-1909!

3 Ways ResponsAble Improves Your Staffing Experience

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Safety Staffing

  1. We provide higher quality, better-trained, safety-aware staff.

We’re able to find high quality people because we have years of experience and connections in finding the best qualified recruits.

  • We have a background in Safety Consulting, so we intimately understand the safety issues and needs of your job.
  • As one of the few safety staffing companies in the nation, we maintain relationships with a larger list of laborers who actually have past experience working in environments where safety is paramount.
  • We offer safety training to every recruit – even those who are not safety staff, but just laborers.
  1. We provide personalized management support.

We are invested in our work force and we are invested in building long term relationships with our contractors. So we offer our contractors actual management support from trained safety personnel.

  • We understand that managing temporary staff comes with some unique challenges, and we help our contractors try to anticipate those and deal quickly with anything that comes up.
  • We are safety staffing specialists. Being a specialist means having experience and focus that others do not. And that makes all the difference.
  1. We guarantee better site safety and job performance.

With our employees on site, we guarantee a safer job site for you which means less issues for you to deal with. Our employees are more reliable and consistent for several reasons:

  • They are often looking for more of a long term relationship with us because we are focused on safety staffing.
  • They have a much better chance of repeat employment through us. This tends to make them a bit more conscientious than most temporary employees.
  • They get more training with us and it gives them more confidence.

Safety staffing is what we do. 

We are hands-on with our employees from beginning to end.  We are not just interested in staffing as a means to an end, as a way to land a bigger job.

This means we are not just looking for warm bodies, we are looking to build stable, dependable people we can invest in and re-employ over and over again with confidence.

Why does that matter to you?

Our focus on safety staffing allows us to offer more of our recruits more consistent employment, which allows us to attract better people and be more selective in our recruiting.

Since we are building a work force, not just staffing a single job, we can justify our own investment in more than the required upfront safety and employment training and have more incentive to offer real management support to the contractors we work with while our employees are on your job site.

To improve your staffing experience, give us a call to talk about how we can provide the staff you need for your business. Reach us at 225-753-1909!

How to Create a Culture of Safety

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Culture of Safety

We all know how important safety is to your workplace. It keeps things running smoothly, manages risk, creates trust with your clients, and most importantly prevents injuries and accidental deaths.

You can’t build or sustain a workplace that values safety all on your own.

It has to be a culture. Merriam Webster defines culture as: “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.”

Managing a safe workplace has to be a shared effort by all. Safety must become a core, shared value by every employee from the top to the bottom.

A Strong Safety Culture Pays Off

Consider these numbers : “A recent SmartMarket Report states that an improved safety culture decreases reportable injuries by 10%, increases the ability to contract new work by 10%, and increases the ability to retain staff by 18%.” See source here.

A safety culture is beneficial to everyone- even your company’s bottom line. Ready to work on creating a culture of safety? Let’s start with this question:

Are You Managing or Leading?

Most companies are very strong on the managing side. They can make things happen. But not so much on the leading side. What’s the difference? While there’s much to read about this topic, to put it simply, a leader helps employees to see the why behind the instructions- taking it a step further in terms of motivation and overall influence.

By managing, organizations make things happen. It’s a linear, practical function…By leading, organizations show employees why safety matters, why they should be motivated to get behind it and want to do it.

Tom Krause, Ph.D., CEO of Behavioral Science Technology Inc., continues to explain that leading in the area of safety is absolutely vital, especially when it comes to the senior leadership of a company. He says, “If senior leadership gets it right, then the culture will change. If senior management doesn’t get it right, then everything else is like swimming upstream. It’s a struggle.”

8  Culture-Building Tips from OSHA:

  1. Define safety responsibilities: Do this for each level within your organization. This should include policies, goals and plans for the safety culture.

  2. Share your safety vision: Everyone should be in the same boat when establishing goals and objectives for their safety culture.

  3. Enforce accountability: Create a process that holds everyone accountable for being visibly involved, especially managers and supervisors. They are the leaders for a positive change.

  4. Provide multiple options: Provide different options for employees to bring their concerns or issues full-face. There should be a chain of command to make sure supervisors are held accountable for being responsive.

  5. Report, report, report: Educate employees on the importance of reporting injuries, first aids and near misses. Prepare for an increase in incidents if currently there is under-reporting. It will level off eventually.

  6. Rebuild the investigation system: Evaluating the incident investigation system is critical to make sure investigations are conducted in an effective manner. This should help get to the root cause of accidents and incidents.

  7. Build trust: When things start to change in the workplace, it is important to keep the water calm. Building trust will help everyone work together to see improvements.

  8. Celebrate success: Make your efforts public to keep everyone motivated and updated throughout the process.

Work with the Safety Experts

Partner with us to add the best trained and equipped safety personnel to your team. We’ve built a company on a culture of safety and we take pride in being the safety specialists.

When you outsource with us, you’re getting people that will bring a culture of safety to YOUR work environment. Call us today at 225-753-1909 or contact us here for more information about outsourcing!

The Risks of NOT Outsourcing Safety Staffing: Part 1

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Safety Staffing

No matter what kind of projects you oversee, most companies can use extra safety personnel at some point. However, you may not be able to justify the need for a full-time staff. This is where a safety staffing agency, such as ResponsAble, can provide you with the temporary employees you need to help with a wide variety of your safety needs.

We believe that building a close relationship with a staffing agency can help ensure that workers possess the skills, training and experience that is needed to meet your needs. Over the years, we’ve seen what can happen to companies that try to handle their staffing in house or work with general staffing agencies. The risks can seriously hurt your pocketbook, so choose your safety staffing strategy wisely.

The Risks of NOT Outsourcing Safety Staffing:

  1. Turnover Costs

The statistics are staggering:

  • Over 50% of people recruited will leave within 2 years
  • 1 in 4 new employees will leave within 6 months
  • Over 50% of organizations experience regular turnover
  • Nearly 70% of organizations report difficulty in replacing staff

This overwhelming attrition has a negative financial impact due to the cost of recruiting, hiring, training a replacement employee, and the overtime work of the current employees that is required until the vacant position is filled.

Estimates place attrition costs at an unbelievable 125% of salary.

You can’t afford to halt your entire job until you have recruited, trained and on-boarded a new position. And we can all agree that safety postions are NOT the jobs for which you want to speed folks through training.

  1. Injuries and Related Costs

The cost of workplace injuries, illnesses and deaths is much greater than the cost of insurance alone. A comprehensive safety and health program reduces insurance rates, improves the work environment, and reduces overall injury expense.

For the employer, a safe workplace not only protects the workers from injury (which should be the number one priority), but it can also lower the cost due to injury or illness, reduce the incidents of absenteeism and turnover, increase productivity and raise employee morale.

Without the safety processes in place, the cost to a business could include:

  • Loss of production
  • Increased workers’ compensation insurance costs
  • Damage to equipment and machinery
  • Increased training and hiring costs due to high turnover
  • Lost work time
  • Decline in worker morale

These losses can be avoided by allowing us, the safety specialists, to do this part of the job for you!

Get better-trained workers on demand.

We recruit safety employees on all levels from entry-level hole watch to Certified Safety Professionals. On top of their traditional training, we provide additional training needed to work safely. With our highly refined database of safety personnel, we provide you with workers who meet and exceed your need for trained safety staff, no matter what your need may be.

We know that what you need is a supply chain with extra, fully-trained safety professionals that you can just call up when you need a position filled. We’re committed to providing you with safety professionals that you can feel confident in upon beginning the job.

ResponsAble takes care of all the details so that you can get the job done. Call us today at 225-753-1909 or click here for a FREE quote.

What is a Fire Watch?

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Fire Watch

OSHA mandates the presence of both hole and fire watch personnel in the Code of Federal Regulations.  Fire watch personnel provide surveillance of areas where “hot work”, such as welding or cutting with torches, is occurring. Fire watch workers may be part of a welding team that make sure that no smoldering fires result from cutting or welding metal. They are a vital part of construction and industrial maintenance safety programs.

The main job for fire watch personnel is to sound the alarm if there is an emergency so that firefighters can be brought in. They may attempt to control the fire but their primary role is not to fight the flames, but to simply alert professionals so that they can come in and take care of it. A fire watch position is not permitted to perform any other duties.

Fire Watch Responsibilities May Include:

  • Constantly patrolling areas where “hot work” is being performed, maintaining vigilance of potential fires.
  • Being familiar with facilities and procedures for sounding an alarm in the event of a fire and having a means of notifying emergency services.
  • Having fire-extinguishing equipment readily available and being well-trained in its use.
  • Maintaining the conditions and requirements stated on the safety permit.
  • Inspecting the entire work area to look for potential release of flammable vapors or liquids before, during, and at the end of each shift.
  • Being prepared to operate fire extinguishers, hydrants, fixed monitors, and hose carts anytime.
  • Never leaving the job site while the work is being done.

ResponsAble Safety Staffing provides trained fire watch personnel so that you can get your job done efficiently and safely. Employers, click here to see how we can work with you to simplify your hiring processes so that you can ramp up quickly, only when you need it.

Also, if you’re looking for a job, we can provide the training and resources you need to do this job and to get started in a career that provides steady employment. Job-seekers, click here to use our easy-to-use application and apply to become a fire watch today.