Worksites are complicated, busy spaces where workers are performing innumerable tasks, and when so much activity merges in one spot, accidents may result. Predicting where hazards might be present on the jobsite is a key step in ensuring employee safety, reducing worker injuries, lost time, and worker’s compensation claims, and that starts with a job safety analysis.

 A job safety analysis (JSA), or job hazard analysis, is a way of evaluating the components of a worker’s job to reveal potential dangers. A high injury rate for a job or employee concerns about a job should and likely would prompt a JSA. Even if a job within a company has had no prior incidents, especially not disabling or severe ones, it may still have that potential and would benefit from an analysis. A new job or one with new or altered processes and procedures might also deserve investigation. Additionally. the benefits of doing a job safety analysis are significant.

1. Compliance: OSHA may require a JSA in many circumstances, and an analysis may help improve compliance through ensuring best working practices
2. Improves Training: helps employees learn best methods and practices for their specific jobs, and documents that training for the company
3. Better Work Methods: determining the best work practices for each job makes those jobs safer, more efficient, and more consistent
4. Reducing Injuries: a JSA won’t just prevent accidents, but help employees work in the safest way for long-term physical wellbeing, reducing chronic injuries and improving quality of life
5. Lower Costs: fewer injuries means less working time lost and fewer workers’ compensation claims

This process begins with careful evaluation and thorough description of each job. Each step of an employee’s task should be detailed, so that potentially hazardous aspects can be identified. By breaking down each work task into a series of steps, it becomes easier to recognize when a task can be dangerous and how it can be done more safely. This evaluation can be done with a series of questions.

1. What can go wrong?
2. What are the consequences?
3. How can it happen?
4. What are contributing factors?
5. What is the likelihood of a hazard?

Answering these questions helps to create a hazard scenario, which describes a dangerous event, its causes, and the likelihood of the event. It incorporates multiple points of context.

1. Environment: where it happened
2. Exposure: who is affected
3. Trigger: the cause or precipitating event
4. Consequence: the outcome
5. Contributing Factors: any other elements on the worksite that make the task more difficult, dangerous, or unnecessarily complicated

It’s important to note that hazards aren’t always accidents, but basic traits of a task. A job with many repetitive motions is a muscle strain hazard, for example. In this sense, job safety analyses look at the long-term impact of work as well, providing a safeguard for employee wellbeing over the course of an entire career.

What’s the next step after investigating a job for safety? Creating controls. Discuss hazard control measures with relevant employees and administrators. These can range from engineering controls, which change equipment or the work environment, to administrative controls, which change aspects of the job like training employees in safer methodologies, or eliminating unnecessary or avoidably dangerous steps.