Safer Days Ahead

he Occupational Safety and Health Administration has made great strides toward improving management practices during the last year. Were the agency to be graded by the Government Performance Project again this year, undoubtedly its marks would rise. OSHA's goal in implementing recent changes has been to better achieve the goals and objectives set out in its strategic plan, says agency Administrator Charles Jeffress.

Take human resources management, for example. During last year's Government Performance Project, current and former OSHA officials expressed frustration that human capital issues had been largely overlooked by top management for years. Among their chief complaints was the fact that most OSHA supervisors are industrial hygienists or safety engineers who moved up the ranks but still lack many of the skills to be good managers. These and other concerns appear to have filtered up.

Last spring, Jeffress gathered his senior executives to discuss what needed doing to improve agency management. High on the list was more attention to training and to developing internal talent, Jeffress says. Among the new initiatives that grew out of that meeting is a one-year senior executive candidate training program designed to boost individuals' capacity to become senior managers. In addition, OSHA is setting up a management development program to train lower-level employees who aspire to the management ranks.

OSHA also is revamping training for compliance officers. Historically, they were taught strictly how to cite violations of standards. But now they also are taught how to evaluate workplace safety and health programs so they can help employers improve their performance. Better employer performance means better OSHA performance, since one of the agency's strategic goals is to reduce workplace injuries and illnesses.

On a parallel front, OSHA has devoted renewed attention to the performance appraisal process. A 1998 employee survey found that staffers were frustrated because appraisals weren't always done on time. The survey also detected that staffers felt awards didn't always go to the most deserving people and problem employees were not always disciplined. Last year, OSHA managers worked hard to get appraisals done by the deadline, Jeffress says. They also strived to give honest feedback-positive or negative. From now on, each December, OSHA will publish internally a list of which employees received awards and for what contributions so other staffers and managers can see what sort of performance warrants extra recognition, Jeffress says.

On the financial management front, progress is somewhat slower but nevertheless positive. In late 1999, OSHA became the first Labor Department agency to implement the department's new cost-accounting system. Jeffress says he expects it will take a year for OSHA to fully test the system and decide what specific activities should be tracked, but he's committed to making the process a success. It's important to know how OSHA spends its time and money to achieve results, he says.

Revamping Reinvention

OSHA also appears to have rebounded from a serious blow to its results-oriented reinvention plan. In April 1999, the District of Columbia federal appeals court struck down the Cooperative Compliance Program (CCP), an enforcement strategy that was the cornerstone of OSHA's reinvention effort. The program targeted employers whose work sites posted high injury and illness rates. OSHA gave these employers a choice between partnering with the agency to identify and correct hazards, or being put on a priority inspection list and potentially facing citations and fines. Companies that chose partnership had to exceed existing requirements by doing such things as creating formal safety and health programs. Piloted in Maine in 1993, the program was lauded by labor groups and many of the state's businesses. Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review even gave the program a Hammer award.

But as OSHA started rolling out the program in other states, ultimately launching it nationally in November 1997, powerful Washington business lobbies cried foul. Led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a coalition of employer groups sued OSHA, declaring that the CCP coerced employers to participate and therefore constituted a de facto regulation that hadn't gone through the public rule-making process. The court agreed. The CCP was "the practical equivalent of a rule that obliges an employer to comply or to suffer the consequences," wrote Judge Douglas Ginsburg.

OSHA did not appeal the decision. Instead, the agency put in place a two-pronged enforcement strategy designed to yield the same overall impact as the
CCP: focus OSHA's limited resources on the most dangerous work sites, and encourage better safety and health performance among employers.

Using injury and illness data collected directly from 80,000 employers in high-hazard industries-an effort begun in 1998 to help OSHA meet 1993 Government Performance and Results Act performance measurement mandates-the agency in 1999 selected 2,200 of the most dangerous sites for surprise inspections. All targeted work sites had lost-workday injury and illness rates-measures of lost work time caused by occupational injuries and illnesses-above 16 for the year. The national average for private industry is about three. Inspections triggered by the approach were four times more likely to uncover the most serious violations than all complaint-triggered and other inspections combined, Jeffress says. "That told me we were doing the right thing."

Using the same data, OSHA identified the 12,500 employers who had a lost-workday rate of eight or higher and, in April 1999, sent letters urging them to take safety and health matters more seriously. "I am writing you both to indicate my concern about the high lost-workday injury and illness rate at your establishment and to identify ways that you can obtain assistance in addressing the hazards in your workplace," Jeffress wrote. "You may wish to consider hiring an outside safety and health consultant, talking with your insurance carrier, or contacting the workers' compensation agency in your state for advice." The letter also reminded employers, "that an OSHA inspection may still occur whether or not you use a consultant to assist with your program."

To further boost safety and health awareness, Jeffress has directed each of OSHA's 67 area offices to create a cooperative program with employers and union groups. For example, OSHA is working with a union group called the Laborers Cooperative Trust and contractors in West Virginia to improve the safety of bridge construction work sites. Contractors meeting certain criteria-such as using a well-trained workforce and having a safety and health program-will be declared SAFE SITEs. The union will collect injury and illness data from each SAFE SITE and share it with OSHA staffers, who will inspect 5 percent of the sites to ensure compliance with the criteria. OSHA intends that the SAFE SITEs will become models for safety and health performance in the bridge construction industry. Jeffress is encouraged by the feedback from employers and workers he's had on SAFE SITE and similar programs nationwide. "The response has been terrific," he says.

Measuring Performance

Another significant achievement of the last year is the launching of the OSHA Performance Tracking and Management System (OPTMS) that tracks monthly indicators to measure OSHA's progress on meeting its strategic goals. Although the system still is in a testing phase, its potential appears to be great. "It's a huge deal," Jeffress says. Indeed, the system for the first time allows OSHA to track elements such as the number of inspections planned and conducted, the number of settlement agreements that include creation of safety and health programs, and the number of consultation visits at sites with serious hazards. The system also draws on inspection and penalty data-previously the only enforcement data OSHA tracked-that has long been available through another computer system. Ultimately, OPTMS also will allow OSHA to analyze injury and illness data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its annual occupational safety and health survey, which is OSHA's primary source of long-term safety and health trend data.

Even while OSHA appears increasingly well-positioned to measure and track its performance, Jeffress remains concerned that Congress' annual budget cycle may not recognize the constraints in collecting critical data. OSHA is trying to measure its impact on the occurrence of injuries and illnesses, but because the data to do that is available only via the BLS survey-which is conducted following the year of study and takes several months to administer and analyze-the data comes in with a one- to two-year lag time. "That will be very frustrating for Congress," which will want to see what OSHA achieved for its budget in the previous year, Jeffress says. "I hope the political system has the patience to see whether we get long-term results from these [efforts] and doesn't expect instant results."GPP report card

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