Obstacles to effective JHA/JSAs in construction

Another study on the obstacles of effective JHAs is coming up next week.

This paper analysed 30 JHAs and interviewed 23 construction safety professionals.

All of the usual players were highlighted regarding problems with JHAs in practice, like:

· Lack of buy-in to the process: many workers and supervisors recognised that aggressive schedules and multiple competing responsibilities may lead to people perceiving JHAs as “unnecessary paperwork, especially if they appear wordy, complicated, or time-consuming”

· Many informed that JHAs were “pencil whipped,” or completed superficially without digesting and understanding the content”

· Communication and coordination gap: here lack of effective communication was present, such as lack of a systematic approach to adequately communicate jobsite changes and updates with workers, lack of communication in some teams leading JHA development and more

· JHA content and task consistency: gaps between JHA content and actual task requirements were major issues.

· Here, it was found that “JHA documents are usually developed by mid- or upper-level managers who are not regularly present on the jobsite or physically involved in task performance”

· Further, “JHA documents are typically driven by regulatory and consensus standards rather than the actual task requirements”

They conclude that “the importance of JHA may not be fully realized by work crews”, and this is hampered by wordy and time-consuming documents which aren’t strongly connected to actual work conditions.