A key qualification for someone who examines safety hazards and ensures company compliance is

The hierarchy of controls is a risk management tool used around the world to manage workplace hazards. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, (NIOSH) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) use the following flow:

Elimination – Physically remove the hazard
Substitution – Replace the hazard
Engineering controls – Isolate people from the hazard
Administrative controls – Change the way people work
Personal protective equipment– Protect the worker with PPE

In Australia, Safe Work Australia includes an additional high-level action of:

Isolation – whereby we isolate the hazard from people

Isolation control follows after Elimination and Substitution control measures have been exhausted or ruled out as impractical.

And Engineering Controls are defined as a physical control measure, including a mechanical device or process.

The control methods at the top of the pyramid are potentially more effective and protective than those at the bottom.

For this article, we examine the hierarchy of controls to discuss how you can use it to control workplace hazards and prevent injury in your business.

How Do You Identify Workplace Hazards?

Unfortunately, identifying hazards doesn’t come naturally to all employees, and you can’t hide behind the notion that it’s just “common sense”. Failure to identify and assess your workplace hazards forces you to be reactive, waiting until accidents happen.

You should involve your employees, who often have the best understanding of the conditions that create hazards and insights into how to control them. Train in what constitutes a workplace hazard and determine the most practical and highest level of control you can use, referring to the hierarchy of controls.

The Tap into Safety Platform offers interactive and engaging hazard perception training online and on smart devices. We focus on critical risk and the common workplace hazards that can lead to a fatality or serious injury within industry-specific scenarios. The Platform has substantial out of the box training modules across a range of industry settings. If we don’t have what you need, we also build custom training content. If you’d like to know more, please contact us or click through to try a free online demo.

See our article, Can Employees Recognise, Recall and Report Workplace Hazards?

Hazard Identification Actions You Can Take

Here are some hazard identification and assessment actions you and your employees should do every day:

Identify known hazards in the tools and equipment in your workplace.
Conduct routine workplace inspections to identify any new hazards that specific work practices create.
Investigate any injuries, incidents, illnesses, or near-miss events to identify the underlying hazard, dangerous work practice, or failure in your current safety program.
Look for trends in types of injuries and illnesses to identify underlying hazards.
Follow up to ensure the controls measures you are using are effective.
Encourage hazard reporting and empower employees to immediately fix any hazard when it is safe to do so.

It’s vital to assess the risk associated with each hazard you identify. Using a risk assessment matrix helps to separate hazards into high-risk and lower-risk tasks. From here, you can determine where to focus your efforts. Work through the hierarchy of controls to assign the highest level of control for each hazard that you identify.

See our article, 8 Workplace Hazards That Can Kill.

See our Hazard Identification course.

Unpicking the Hierarchy of Controls

The hierarchy of controls pyramid has six levels. You must always aim to eliminate the risk, which is the most effective control. If this is not reasonably practicable, you must minimise the risk by working through the other alternatives in the hierarchy. Administrative controls and PPE are the least effective at reducing risk because they do not control the hazard at the source and rely on human behaviour and supervision.

Elimination: Is it possible to physically eliminate the hazard? Using this control, the hazard becomes void and therefore, does not expose employees to a risk of injury.
Substitution: Is it possible to replace the hazard, for example, changing the equipment or tools used to perform a hazardous task?
Isolation: Can we isolate or separate the hazard or hazardous work practises from people not involved in the work or the general work areas? For example, by marking off hazardous
areas, installing screens or barriers.
Engineering Controls: Can we use machinery and devices to remove the hazard? For instance, use mechanical devices such as trolleys or hoists to move heavy loads; place guards around moving parts of machinery; install residual current devices (electrical safety switches); set work rates on a production line to reduce fatigue; install sound dampening measures to reduce exposure to unpleasant or hazardous noise.
Administrative Controls: Is it possible to change the process or the way that employees perform a hazardous task? This type of control is highly dependent on workers following the preventative process, and they remain at risk of a workplace injury.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE): Is it possible to provide PPE that will protect employees from the hazard? Relying on PPE to protect your employees is the last line of defence against a workplace injury. Too often, PPE is forgotten, ill-fitting or doesn’t provide the appropriate level of protection.

How to Review Your Control Measures

The Safe Work Australia Model Code of Practice on How to Manage Work Health and Safety Risks provides guidelines on how to review your control measures to ensure that they are relevant and keeping your employees safe. Consider the following questions:

Are the control measures working effectively in both their design and operation?
Are the control measures creating new problems?
Are you missing any hazards?
Are the new work methods, new equipment or chemicals making the job safer?
Are all employees following the safety procedures?
Do your employees need more instruction and training on how to work safely?
Are your employees actively identifying hazards and possible control measures?
Are your employees openly raising health and safety concerns and reporting problems promptly?
Are the frequency and severity of health and safety incidents reducing?

When new legislation or new information becomes available, you must audit the control measures to ensure that they remain the most effective. When you introduce new machinery and equipment, you should check that your processes and control measures remain relevant.

Training to Understand the Hierarchy of Controls and Obligations

Everyone needs to understand the hierarchy of controls; however leaders, managers and supervisors are critical and they need to know their health and safety obligations and how to keep people safe and well.

Tap into Safety has training to help supervisors, managers and leaders understand their responsibilities. We use microlearning to train the key messages and provide strategies and actions they can take to improve their skills and protect your organisation. We have courses on:

and many more…

To Conclude

The safety hierarchy of controls pyramid is a systematic workflow to provide the most effective control measure to workplace hazards. The tool is used widely around the world and prescribes a method to always begin with eliminating any hazards that you identify in your workplace.

Where elimination is not practical, you should substitute tools and methods for less hazardous ones, or isolate the task from employees through barriers or screens. Alternatively, you can use engineering controls such as mechanical devices or shut off switches to protect employees from injury.

The top four controls of the hierarchy are the most effective in preventing workplace injury. The two lower-level controls, Administrative controls and PPE are the least effective at minimising risk because they do not control the hazard at the source and rely on human behaviour and supervision.

This article is also available on the Tap into Safety Podcast.

The best way to prevent injuries or illness in your workplace is to find the hazards that could cause injury or illness, and fix them. Do this by following four simple steps:

Spot the Hazard

Assess the Risk

Fix the Problem

Evaluate Results

This process is often called risk assessment.

Involve your workers

The workers using the equipment or chemicals, performing the tasks and being in the work environment every day are essential to help you identify hazards.

Don’t underestimate your workers’ input: they often have first-hand knowledge, experience and ideas about how to reduce safety risks, make improvements and find solutions.

When introducing any changes, make sure everyone knows what’s being done and how you are controlling the hazards. Involving your workers in these ways reinforces the idea that safety is everyone’s responsibility, and ensures you meet your requirements to consult with your workforce.

Spot the hazard

A hazard is anything that has the potential to cause injury, illness or damage to your health. Hazards at work may include:

manual tasks
untidy workplaces
bullying and violence
working at heights
faulty or unguarded machinery
chemicals
noise
poor work design (for example, tasks involving repetitive movements)
inadequate management systems (for example, no procedures for performing tasks safely or for using personal protective equipment).

The first step in ensuring a safe workplace is to identify hazards. There are a number of ways to find hazards in your workplace:

ask workers and contractors in your workplace about any hazards they may have noticed
look at the physical structure of your workplace: for example, stairs, desks, floor surfaces, exits, driveways
check all machinery, appliances and vehicles used for work
examine how substances are stored, used and moved from one place to another
review your injury records, including ‘near misses’
review information from designers, manufacturers or suppliers of the equipment and substances in your workplace.

Use a checklist

A checklist can help you examine your work environment, the tasks your workers do, and the machinery/equipment used in your workplace.

You can use a checklists for regular/ frequent tasks; for example, a maintenance checklist or a daily pre-start checklist for equipment to make sure it’s in safe working order.

See Resources below for samples. Print them off, grab a pen and do a walkabout, talking to the workers involved in the environment, task or equipment you’re checking.

Assess the risk

A risk is the likelihood of a hazard causing injury, illness or damage to your health.

Your list of hazards may be long, with some hazards posing more safety risks than others.

So you need to work out which hazards are more serious than other and deal with those first.

To assess the risk associated with each hazard, ask these questions:

What is the potential impact of the hazard?

How severe could an injury or illness be?
What's the worst possible damage the hazard could cause to someone’s health?
Would it require simple first aid only? Or cause permanent ill health or disability? Or could it kill?

How likely is the hazard to cause someone harm?

Could it happen at any time or would it be a rare event?
How often are workers exposed to the hazard?

You should also consider how many people are exposed to the hazards, and remember that everyone is different. A hazard may pose more risk to some people than others because of differences in physical strength, experience and training.

Fix the problem

You should always aim to remove a hazard completely from your workplace. Where this isn’t practical, you should work through the other alternatives systematically.

Some problems may be fixed easily and straight away, while others will need more effort and planning. Concentrate on the most urgent hazards without neglecting the simpler ones that could be easily and immediately fixed.

Some solutions are more effective than others. Make sure your solution does not introduce new hazards.

Hierarchy of controls

Use the hierarchy of controls to remove or reduce risk in your workplace. It starts with the most effective control method (removing the hazard from your workplace completely) and finishes with the least effective (wearing personal protective equipment/PPE).

You must use the highest-ranked control that is practical for controlling the risk. Only use lower-ranked controls as a last resort or until a more effective way of controlling risk can be used.

Sometimes using more than one control measure could be the most effective way to reduce the exposure to hazards.

1 Eliminate the hazard

Remove it completely from your workplace. For example: repair damaged equipment; outsource processes involving hazardous chemicals or equipment to a company set up to manage them safely. If this is not practical, then…

2 Substitute the hazard

Replace it with a safer alternative. For example: use a less toxic chemical; lift smaller packages. If this is not practical, then…

3 Isolate the hazard

Keep it away from workers as much as possible. For example: relocate photocopiers to separate, ventilated rooms; install barriers to restrict access to hazardous work areas. If this is not practical, then…

4 Use engineering controls

Adapt tools or equipment to reduce the risk. For example: place guards on dangerous parts of machinery; use a trolley for moving heavy loads. If this is not practical, then…

5 Use administrative controls

Change work practices and organisation. For example, rotate jobs to reduce the time spent on any single work task; train staff in safe work procedures; carry out routine maintenance of equipment. If this is not practical, then…

6 Use personal protective equipment (PPE)

For example: use hearing/eye protection equipment, hard hats, gloves and masks; train staff to use PPE correctly.

Evaluate results

After you think you’ve fixed the problem, find out whether the changes have been effective. Get feedback from those affected by the changes and include them in any modifications to their workplace or work routines. Look at your incident records to see if numbers are going down.

Make sure your solution does not introduce new hazards. Maybe you and your workers can even see more ways to make further improvements. Set a date to re-assess the risk. Choose a timeframe appropriate to the task and the risk involved. If the work process changes, or new equipment is introduced to a task, then the risk assessment must be reviewed.

During each of these four steps, employers, managers, contractors and workers need to communicate with each other and work together.

Hazard management is not a one-off event — it’s an ongoing process.