EHS Insider Blog

An Overview of OSHA's 2021 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Updating the HazCom Standard The landscapes of hazmat regulations, chemical classifications and employee HAZWOPER training are constantly changing. And American industry leaders can expect more changes soon! In February 2021, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finally published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for the HazCom standard. OSHA's goal aligns with the most recent revision of the UN's GHS.

While both business owners and employees are eager to return to work after the COVID-19 shutdown, the virus has created a new safety hazard that every workplace must address. As a supplement to the Guidance for Preparing Workplaces for COVID-19 publication, OSHA has issued Guidance on Returning to Work. This new publication outlines nine guiding principles for a safer workplace and offers examples of how to implement them.

The right safety management software helps you stay compliant with industry, local, state, and federal regulations and keep your employees and visitors safe—and it should make it as easy as possible to do all that. For example, employees often don't report near-misses, because the process is too complicated or it takes too much time away from their work. With software to make that process easy and transparent, it's much faster and convenient for employees to comply and it goes a long way in creating a culture of safety. That's just the beginning. Here's an overview of what safety software can do for you:

As COVID-19 continues to work its way through the population, OSHA has issued new safety protocols for workplaces to better address the issue and help protect employees, contractors and visitors. This guidance was issued on January 29, 2021, and it offers details to supplement what many employers are already been doing.

Kata is a Japanese term referring to structure or routine and its purpose is ongoing improvement: following the routine is a practice and it allows you to get better at whatever it is you're doing. When applied to business, it's divided into the improvement kata, which is the four steps your organization can follow to make improvements and the coaching kata, which is the steps taken by leadership to help employees implement the improvement kata.