In today's episode, Dr. Ayers discusses the importance of stop work authority. Do your employees have stop work authority?
The Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast
Episode 159 - Stop Work Authority
Welcome to the Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast, episode number 159 and today's episode we're going to make this nice and short and sweet and we're going to talk about one topic which is called Stop Work Authority. So this is really more of just I'm just kind of throwing out this in the place that you work now. Do your people have stop work authority? Can they literally be working and say I don't understand the instructions? I don't understand if you want to call it the mission, I don't understand the SOP, I've been told to go grab X chemical and I don't understand. Do I wear gloves, a respirator, do I, you know, can your people, if they find a hazard that maybe wasn't planned for, maybe wasn't assessed, do they have the authority to stop work or is the attitude of figure it out and get the job done, you know. So that's a great attitude to have to figure it out, but are we telling people to work unsafely or are we saying stop work, figure out exactly what you need, make sure you have all the tools, procedures, any training, any PPE, anything, then we want to make sure that you get the work done, you get the mission done, you know. A lot of it is in the freezing that we use and obviously with safety people I know that many times we do everything we can to use those proper words, but we know supervisors are out there. That will say just get it done, so sometimes people feel that pressure just to get it done because they've all said to get it done. So this is just a little refresher of let's go back, let's talk to our people, our supervisors and really understand do they have that stop work authority or is it that the company says no, it's never actually been done, so you're still not really sure, like if somebody's still skittish doesn't matter what it says on paper, a person's like I'm not doing this, no matter what. So let's kind of sit down, figure out the culture that we're in and just make sure people have that stop work authority. So that's it for today's episode, nice and short and sweet episode 159 is complete. Thank you for joining me. My name is Dr. David Ayers. Thank you and have a safe day.
In today’s episode, Dr. Ayers discusses the importance of stop work authority. Do your employees have stop work authority?