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By Phil Molé, MPH
Most EHS professionals have heard of job safety analysis (JSA) and know that they’re important tools for preventing injuries. Even so, many EHS pros also report uncertainty about the quality of their JSAs, citing gaps in information within the JSAs and limited actual use of the JSAs for managing safety. Sometimes, it can feel like you have to be a safety expert with decades of operational risk experience to get high quality JSAs, but thanks to the benefits of artificial intelligence, that’s not how it has to be.
In what follows, you’ll learn how, with the help of AI-enhanced EHS software, you can develop and use JSAs like an expert.
What is a JSA?
JSA is a type of risk assessment widely used by EHS professionals and recommended by safety and health agencies such as OSHA. Unlike incident investigations, which take place after employees have done the work and after an accident happened, you complete JSAs before anyone conducts the associated work.
When you conduct a JSA, you break a job down into constituent tasks to make it easier to identify and assess risks, since there are fewer places for risks to “hide.” JSAs also provide a great opportunity for engaging plant floor employees in the risk assessment process, which builds better buy-in to your safety programs and results in more accurate risk information.
In short, the advantages of JSAs are that:
1) By breaking a job down into constituent tasks as a precursor to identifying risks, you leave less room for those risks to “hide”; and
2) By directly involving your people in the process, you not only improve engagement, but also get better hazard and risk information from the frontline workers who understand them best.
How Can You Improve Your JSAs?
If JSAs are so potentially useful, why do EHS professionals sometimes not make the most of them?
Let’s dig in. Here are several common problems that undermine the effectiveness of JSAs, and the ways that modern EHS software with AI features can help.
Good JSAs Start with Good Job Task Descriptions
Job task descriptions are the foundation of your JSAs, because you’re basically building all of the subsequent steps on top of them. Your descriptions need to not only be accurate but also contain enough relevant details to help you identify hazards, and from there, appropriate controls. The problem is, many EHS pros or teams completing JSAs often leave out key details without meaning to, and that weakens their JSAs before they’re even complete.
JSA software with AI can analyze your draft descriptions and assess their strengths and then offer suggestions for improvement. For example, if you describe a job task involving hand assembly of components and then tightening them into place, and don’t mention how the employee tightens them, the AI can flag that and prompt you to mention the type of tool used, e.g. a hand wrench, detail that affects the level of hazards involved. If the job task involves climbing a ladder, the AI will check whether you’ve included the height in the description.
With better job task descriptions, you’ll be better able to move on to the next steps of the JSA.
Doing Better Job Hazard Identification
Identifying hazards, aka conditions that result in risks, is a fundamental purpose of doing JSAs. The problem is that JSAs are only useful in addressing risks in proportion to the accuracy of their hazard identifications, and accurate hazard identification in turn depends on the knowledge levels of the people completing the JSA.
Even seasoned EHS professionals can sometimes overlook hazards at this stage, especially if they’ve never previously completed a JSA for the specific job tasks under review.
JSA software with AI features can help here by supplementing your own expertise. The AI can analyze your AI-improved job task description and, using machine learning trained on enormous safety datasets, accurately identify associated hazards.
Improving Controls Selection
Controls are the payoff of your JSA process. They’re the actions you’re going to take to reduce the hazards and risks identified. Your ability to select good controls depends on having a lot of experience and expertise based on familiarity with the specific hazards identified in the JSA and the types of controls most effective at reducing the associated risk. Here again, is a common limitation. The dataset available to most EHS professionals is simply not big enough to enable optimal matching of controls to hazards, and even if it were, it’s not easy to actually use that knowledge to make good control selections.
AI-enabled JSA software has no such limitations. Using machine learning, the software can scan your descriptions and hazards (again, already also optimized via AI) and harness the enormous datasets it’s been trained on to provide a highly curated list of effective controls for your hazards. If you don’t have the recommended controls in your controls library yet, you can add them and build your risk management maturity.
Looking at the JSA process as a whole, all of the above features also provide you with a consistent process that reduces subjectivity and making it easier to compare “apples with apples” when you’re reviewing risks and controls across your organization. You get expert-level JSAs every time, which means that you’ll get more benefits from your JSAs in reducing risks.
Rolling Out Better Access to JSAs
Even if you and your team create great JSAs, they’ll be of little use to you if you can’t access and use the JSAs. This is, unfortunately, a very common problem. Many EHS professionals complete their JSAs with the best of intentions but then file them in a manila folder in a cabinet or digitally file them in a virtual folder on a desktop. In either case, the JSAs aren’t accessible, which means you’re not actively using the JSAs to reduce risks and improve job safety, which defeats the purpose of doing them in the first place.
The same JSA software that includes AI features also has lets you centralize access to all your JSAs in one location, accessible from anywhere. You’ll no longer need to struggle to share the JSAs with employees, or even to struggle to remember where they are. Thanks to the software, your JSAs will always be within reach as the frequently referenced tools for improving job safety they’re intended to be.
Looking for More Information?
Download our handy checklist for the guidance you need to help you standardize and streamline your JSA process across operations.
Ready to learn more about how AI can improve EHS management? Visit our AI Glossary & Learning Hub to continue learning on your own. There, you’ll find a curated list of resources covering various aspects of AI and EHS, as well as definitions of common terms.
We also invite you to download and read our new white paper, “Why EHS Professionals Can’t Afford to Ignore AI.” You’ll get a deep dive into all of the reasons why EHS pros like you have a generational opportunity to use AI to pivot from a reactive safety management approach to a proactive approach that reduces injury rates and fosters a positive safety culture. From there, you can also get some guidance on what to look for when selecting an EHS software vendor with AI capabilities with our new AI vendor evaluation checklist.
Let VelocityEHS Help!
If you’re ready to jump to the part about how Velocity can help, we’re standing by to talk!
Our recently launched AI Hazard Analyzer & AI Controls Recommendations in our JSA software gives you guidance to instantly assess job descriptions, identify hazards, and get tailored control recommendations. Vēlo, powered by VelocityAI, supplements your expertise so you can improve your JSA quality, consistency, and efficiency without slowing down.
Our VelocityAI-enhanced capabilities in our broader software portfolio also include AI PSIF Insights to help you identify less obvious serious risks within your incident descriptions. VelocityAI also can help you improve root cause analysis, strengthen incident descriptions, make better controls selections in ergonomics assessments, and auto-process contractor documents like OSHA logs and certificates of insurance. And that’s just the beginning.
In fact, why not see for yourself how we can help? Get in touch today to set up a meeting so you can see our software in action!