Safe workplace: eliminate and manage safety hazards in the work environment, and minimise risky behaviours of your people

Safe people: dramatically reduce safety incidents and injuries by ensuring everyone knows and diligently applies the safest methods

Safety culture: raise awareness of safety hazards on all jobs and use TWI JS habits to build a culture of continuous safety improvement

Safe methods: TWI JS provides a structured method of analysing the way each job is done, so safety hazards can be reliably identified, eliminated and mitigated.

Safe skills: by deliberately building safety skills into on-the-job instruction, every person knows and is able to apply the best, safest method of doing each job

Safe behaviour: safety is built into the daily operations routines of supervisors and their teams and safety attitudes and behaviours are consistently reinforced through observation and coaching

TWI JS 4-Step Method: an improvement pattern to identify hazards and develop effective countermeasures

Ten Hazard Spots: an observation technique that uncovers every hazard on every job, person and potential contact that may lead to safety incidents

Chain of Causation: a pattern of analysing and predicting how hazards combine to become causes of safety incidents, in order to prevent future incidents

Four Rules: a hierarchy of countermeasure categories that guides supervisors to developing the most effective way of handling a hazard

In TWI Job Safety we say ‘The meaning of safety is to spot and handle hazards before an incident occurs.’ A clean safety record is not achieved by accident, it is the result of the vigilance and daily efforts of our supervisors. To be effective in this task, supervisors first need to be able to accurately and quickly detect all hazards in their workplace and their people. You cannot even start to deal with a hazard unless you recognise its existence.

Many supervisors depend on general experience to indicate where hazards exist – an incident happened in a particular way in the past and they try to prevent its recurrence. Corrective action after a safety incident is an important part of an effective safety system.

But preventing recurrence – whilst certainly important – is not enough: it implies that hazards will slip through the net undetected and put our people at risk of harm. A hazard missed is a hidden menace.

TWI Job Safety provides a systematic pattern that enables our supervisors to reliably detect hazards and develop and implement effective countermeasures before safety incidents occur. Like all Training within Industry skills, TWI JS is developed through frequent application and practice and coaching. This way, managers and supervisors quickly ‘learn to see’ and anticipate the causes of future safety incidents and take swift, appropriate action.

Once a supervisor becomes aware of a hazard, it is essential to take swift, effective preventive action. Any delay or an inappropriate or ineffective countermeasure may put the person at risk. The TWI JS 4-Step Method provides clear guidance on how to identify the nature of the safety hazard – method, skill or attitudes and behaviours – and to apply an appropriate countermeasure to address the hazard before it gets a chance to cause a safety incident or injury.

Safety happens when methods, skills and attitudes – in short, the way our people do their work – improve. Supervisors skilled in improving methods, instructing people on the job and leading and motivating them to follow standard work and remain vigilant will find it easier to improve Job Safety. If our current method does not keep the person reliably safe, it must be improved. If a safe method exists, but the person does not know this method, then developing knowledge and skill must be developed. If the person knows how to apply the correct standard work but chooses not to apply it, then attitude and behaviour must be improved.

Therefore, in TWI Job Safety we say that the TWI J-skills of TWI Job Methods, TWI Job Instruction and TWI Job Relations provide effective ‘solution courses’ to handle safety hazards. They become the ‘tip of the spear’ in supervisors’ efforts to improve safety in their department.

TWI Job Safety emphasises the power of building safety into the environment and methods applied in doing the work. One of the five responsibilities of supervisors for safety TWI JS identifies to ‘Make all jobs safe’: it is the supervisor’s job to understand every safety hazard on every job. They then apply ‘Four Rules for Breaking the Chain of Causation’ to handle every hazard before it leads to an incident or injury.

One of the most effective ways of making all jobs safe is to apply TWI Job Methods, which yields many ways to ‘Eliminate the Hazard’ and ‘Safeguard the job’. TWI Job Safety reinforces the power of TWI JM through the Ten Hazard Spot, which are applied to draw the supervisor’s attention to safety-related aspects of the job that need to be questioned and improved. This systematic treatment of every detail of every job ensures that safety is systematically built-into all job methods used in the department and both the workplace and its people are made safe.

Once the new method has been developed and tested, TWI Job Relations is used to prepare the people in the department and carefully guide them through the required changes. TWI Job Instruction is used to develop the needed knowledge and skill and to build the new habits that will make the changes stick and ensure the maximum effect of the TWI JS countermeasures for every hazard. By using the TWI J programs together, supervisors are able to make quick, sustainable changes that dramatically improve safety in their department.