Writing safety manuals is not glamorous work. Yet a safety manual is the foundation of a good safety management system. Perhaps the best reason I have heard for having one was presented at the 2001 conference of the Center for Chemical Process Safety (Perry, et al):
"A 'Management System' that has not been codified by a written program is merely an informal set of practices or activities, however well organized, intentioned, or accepted. These practices will likely not be sustainable over the life of the organization because of a lack of a solid institutional memory that can serve as a common basis for employee understanding of the desired management intentions - particularly as people come and go in the organization."
But if safety manuals are so important why do so many gather dust on shelves?
Among the many possible reasons, one is that the manuals themselves do not invite use. They may be poorly written, hard to understand, or out of date. In this paper I will present proven tips for building better safety manuals. If you start with an effective manual, use it regularly, and improve it on an ongoing basis then your organization will benefit from the accumulated safety knowledge it contains.
The first step in building a better safety manual is to identify your audience. It is not regulators, though many manuals seem to be written for them. Your audience is the workers and supervisors who will apply the safety requirements to their work. They need a manual with information that is easy to find and use. A well-written manual will translate regulatory requirements, industry standards, and company rules into language that your employees can understand and apply on the job every day. It will complement what they learn in training sessions and serve as a ready reference when questions arise. Your goal as a writer is to make a manual that is so useful that employees will ask, "What does the Safety Manual say?" when they are confronted with a safety question.
With this audience in mind you want to decide how much information to include. Entire books are written about confined space entry, electrical safety, machine guarding, and other topics; so we know that we can't include everything there is to know about each topic. We can, however, include the key information that will be applied on the job, especially the things that we are holding workers and supervisors accountable for. The more concisely we can organize these things the better, as busy workers and supervisors won't take the time to sort through pages of information when they just want to know what they are expected to do. This provides the writer with two choices.
The first choice is to write a concise manual, designed for workers and supervisors, that contains safe work procedures and administrative information. This approach gives everyone the same information, though front-line workers may have more information than they really want.
