“Our main goal is to help your business grow”.

This statement has been at the core of our business outlook since we were founded. Now it’s time to prove it!

We are offering one lucky small business the opportunity to have their safety management system designed and produced by us, for free.  The safety management system will be compliant with the Nova Scotia Construction Safety Association’s Certificate of Recognition (COR) auditing standard.

To be eligible, make sure that your business meets the entry criteria* and simply answer the following questions:

Who will be responsible for the administration of the programme once it is implemented?

What is your business classification? (What do you do?)

 Why should your company be selected for a free safety management system? (Are you a new business? Are you a socially responsible company that deserves some help? Are you experiencing higher than average incident rates?)

What difficulties has your company faced when trying to set up their safety programme? (Has limited administrative support been a barrier to setting up a programme? Are you simply too busy to do it yourself?)

How will a safety programme benefit your business? (Are you seeking COR certification or are you looking to bid on additional contracts?)

 
We will select one company from the submissions that we receive and reply to the winner with details on how to proceed.  The offer will at midnight on June 30th, 2015 or when we reach thirty submissions (whichever comes first).

Email your submission to info@claymoresafety.com with “June, 2015 Offer” as the subject line.



This is the first time that we are extending this type of offer and we hope that it will be a success.  We would like to make this a recurring event in an effort to promote workplace safety in Nova Scotia and help to grow local businesses.

 



*Entry Criteria: Your business must:

Be registered and operate in Nova Scotia.
- Have 20 or fewer employees.
- Be willing to provide a written testimonial at the end of the project.
- Not currently be represented by another safety consulting firm.
- Be willing to have your business showcased on our website. 

Have you ever wondered how Workers' Compensation rates are calculated in Nova Scotia? As a business owner, understanding how your business is charged the applicable assessment rate can help you create a benchmark for safety performance and lower your compensation premiums over time based on your company's experience rating. For detailed information on how the Workers' Compensation Board of Nova Scotia calculates their rate premiums, please visit their website here.

Generally speaking, job procedures are a list of the specific steps that are required to complete a specific task while at work. A "safe job procedure" will explain how to perform the job successfully. Some people confuse a "safe job procedure" with a "safe work practice", which is more of a tool to provide general awareness rather than a list of steps that need take place for a job to be successful.

Admittedly, both safe job procedures and safe work practices are not the most exciting of safety related topics. In fact, they are often overlooked by many smaller businesses in order to focus on other areas of their business. When looking at how a business completes their work, overlooking the importance of safe job procedures can be detrimental to the company's workers and reputation.

Effectively developed and implemented safe job procedures will:

• Provide workers with a plan for how to safely complete a job.
• Communicate the quality and service expectations that a small business owner wishes to maintain if they are not present at all work sites.
• Identify the hazards and precautions that are expected when completing the specific task.
• Reduce the likelihood of workers being injured when completing the job identified in the safe job procedure.
• Decrease the frequency of quality or service errors.
• Provide a reference to any external information that may be needed by an unsupervised workforce. 
• Act as a marketing tool for the company when bidding on new work by assuring prospective customers that a defined process exists for work that your business is contracted to perform. 

If you feel that your business could benefit from an established set of safe job procedures, please visit the contact page. We would be happy to help. 
 

Claymore Safety Inc. has been added to the Nova Scotia Department of Labour & Workforce Development's Consultant List. This list identifies Safety Professionals in Nova Scotia that are able to help businesses satisfy their mandated Occupational Health & Safety requirements.

If you are interested in searching the list of Consultants, you can view it here.

We look forward to working with our Customers to build collaborative relationships with the Department.
 

We are getting ready for the upcoming New Year by planning website upgrades and expanding our service offerings.


Stay tuned for information on specific improvements early in 2014.


We are really excited for things to come and would like to thank our customers and clients for their continued support.

The process of selecting a safety consultant can be a daunting task. Whenever a company seeks the services of a consultant, they are looking solve a problem that the company’s in-house employees do not have the time, resources or experience to solve on their own.  If there is not an established relationship with a tried and tested consultant, interviewing and selecting a person to help can compound the problem and add uncertainty into the mix.
 
To paraphrase Alan Weiss, Ph.D., an expert on business consulting: the role of any good consultant is to improve state of their client’s business. In other words, a consultant should always leave their client’s business in better shape than when they started their project. Below I have listed four ways that businesses can improve their chances of selecting a reputable
consultant to serve their occupational health and safety needs:

1 – Review their credentials. Most reputable designating bodies have a strict set of academic, experiential and ethical guidelines that their membership must follow. If you are unsure of what the letters behind a person’s name mean, a quick chat with an in-house safety person should be able to decipher what the letters indicate. 
  
2 – Try to thoroughly examine the problem that requires the services of the consultant. By better understanding why the business needs the consultant’s services, it will be possible to develop measures of success during the project. Clearly defined needs help to establish milestones in the consulting relationship that will later be used to determine if the project is on track or if the business should not use the consultant in the future due to deviations from the expected benchmarks.
 
3 – Speak face-to-face with potential candidates. Many deals can be brokered over the phone or through email, but when trying to develop a trusting relationship with the consultant, it is always best to meet in person.
 
4 – Ask for referrals. Request that the consultant provide a list of contacts from current or recent previous clients. If the consulting relationship is or was beneficial with these contacts, then the likelihood is good that the relationship will be beneficial for the contracting business as well.  In some cases, the organization in charge of regulating occupational health and safety in your area may have a list of “approved” consultants that can be used to shortlist candidates to help your
business.

Hopefully these suggestions can help your business select the most appropriate consultant for your company’s needs. For more information, please  see the contact us page.

In the unfortunate event that an emergency situation befalls your company, having an emergency response plan (also known as an ERP) is absolutely critical in the successful management of the incident. At a minimum, the plan should include the following information:

• Emergency contact numbers for emergency responders (EMS, Fire Department and the local Police if 911 s not available in your area)
• A list of the company’s incident response representatives (Operations, Safety, Human Resources, Legal, Public Relations, and senior management designates are typically identified)
• Diagrams indicating reporting requirements and company representative responsibilities
• A clearly defined set of directions on how to access work sites
• Maps of your company’s work locations (both a general site map and a detailed structural diagram to indicate emergency exits and critical safety equipment)
• Contact information for applicable regulatory agencies, security contractors and environmental clean-up specialists, retained lawyers, communications spokespeople and retained medical professionals (as applicable)
• Employee Assistance Program representative contact information

 It is also important to conduct drills that test the plan that has been created. Drills can be easily scheduled in Outlook or other email system calendars for easy reminders and universal notification for the parties involved. More mature ERP systems will often require that the contact representatives learn the jobs of the response members that are junior and senior to their positions so that in the event that one of the representatives is unavailable, the process can still be seamlessly implemented.

The ERP system is a valuable tool in post-incident management and its complexity will vary depending on the size and nature of your business. For help implementing an emergency response plan for your business, visit the contact us page.

Toolbox or tailgate meetings are brief meetings, usually done at the start of a work shift, that focus on the work for the day and review generic or task specific safety concerns that may require discussion.  I have found that implementing the following three tactics can help to ensure that the toolbox meeting will to keep your listeners focused on the material.

Understand your audience – What do your people relate to? How can you effectively relate your content to the people that are participating in the meeting? What motivates them to work safely?  Understanding these items will help you to get your audience to pay closer attention to your messages and create an emotional connection to the material that you are presenting by personifying information that is reviewed.

Keep it brief, but informative – Following the suggestion above, it is important to understand that your audience is getting ready to start their work day. They may be easily distracted by thoughts of planning their day or with biological needs (waiting to eat breakfast, not yet having their morning coffee, etc.). Keep in mind that you are presenting a toolbox talk, not a corporate level annual review meeting.  It can be difficult to maintain the balance of communicating information and keeping attention, but understanding your audience’s motivators and distracters will help.

Make it topical – Try to make the information that you present relatable to the work that your group performs.  For example, most safety professionals receive alerts or bulletins from other industries that may have little to nothing to do with our company’s area of expertise, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be valuable. If you are presenting a safety alert focusing on an injury caused by a failed lockout/tagout or botched energy isolation on a pressurized system to a group of workers in a woodworking shop, relate the content by asking questions about the material. “What went wrong? How did the worker get injured? When might we use an energy isolation to protect workers? How do we make sure that people are aware of the equipment that has been isolated?”

Not all workplace safety material will captivate your audience and keep them entertained for the duration of your meeting. This is especially true with detailed compliance related information (which is incredibly valuable, but can be dry). But hopefully these few ideas will help to streamline your toolbox meetings and keep your group focused. 

Well, here we go... 

Thanks for stopping by and checking out our site and our blog.  In the next few days, we will be updating our site and adding new pages as we finish all of our content. 

Some of the topics that we will be blogging about will include:

• Original articles.
• Reviews of training programs or
  products.
• Safety related news stories.
• Information from other safety
  websites that we find interesting or could be of value to our
  readers.
• Book reviews.
• Safety Management best practices.

Our goal in publishing this blog is to promote discussion, networking opportunities, growth and development among safety professionals and those with a vested interest in workplace safety.  So please comment on our posts or email us if you have an idea for a posting topic or would like to contribute to the page.

Check back soon.
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