Human resources management principles and practices

Human Resources Management

For the bottling supervisor - reducing the number of safety incidents by Objective 1: Ensure that all the employees are familiar with the safety norms within the enterprise.

Ensure that all employees apply a common set of safety norms, referred to in a proper documentation.

Ensure that no bottling worker works more than a certain amount of hours, probably eight, during which he is able to devote his entire attention to the job in progress.

In my opinion, in order to be able to reduce the safety incidents by 15%, the first thing that needs to be done is determine (1) causes of the safety incidents and (2) solutions for these causes. Referring to the first one, the causes can range anywhere from not applying safety norms to people being tired at work and losing their focus. However, for this objective, our main concern is safety norms. This action will refer to several phases of implementation of a common set of safety norms within the producing facility.

First of all, we need to have a set of safety norms. In this sense, it is best to hold a brainstorming session with the most important characters in this act. The questions that will be asked is what safety rules do we agree that the employees must certainly abide by in order to reduce risk in the working environment. For the brainstorming session, it is best that we invite one or two workers, who will represent the workers in referring to the safety conditions in the working environment and what causes can be identified by them, the bottling supervisor, who, as a supervisor, is able to see things at a macro level and refer to what the worker needs to do in order to remain on safe grounds, and Doug himself, more as a person able to draw the most relevant conclusions.

The brainstorming session can come up with all sorts of results, ranging from wearing adequate physical protection equipment (helmet, gloves etc.) in the workplace to working within a certain daily schedule previously determined (so as to avoid accidents determined by workers who are tired from overwork) or to norms on eating and drinking in the working environment. Anyway, the idea is that a draft set of rules is likely to be written.

This is where the bottling supervisor and Doug become more visible. In order to be able to have a proper documentation with the safety norms that need to be abided by, the draft needs to be polished. A proper schematic skeleton should be laid in place so as to cover the entire problematic and be referred to in the documentation. I would suggest, for example, first presenting the main causes of accidents within the working environment (as a percentage, in the industry in general and in the company itself), presenting the main safety norms that the brainstorming team has come up with and presenting how the workers need to apply these norms. The initial drafted ideas will thus be polished into a working document.

The third phase of the action plan designed to implement the second objective of the three refers to communicating the conceived safety norms to the workers. The last two phases (the third and fourth) are perhaps the most difficult of all. In this cases, we are referring to identifying and using the proper means of communication in order to ensure that the safety norms message reaches the audience (the workers) and, especially, that they properly react on the information received, with the expected results.