Risk Assessment
Risk Assessment
What is risk assessment?
- From identifying hazards to carrying out countermeasures
- Real risks stay hidden without shop-floor involvement
- Must be redone whenever a process changes or an accident occurs
Once you adopt risk assessment, an accident stops being a matter of telling people to be careful and becomes a question of who changes the working conditions, and by when. 'Press crush hazard' becomes 'Press No. 3: guard door interlock fails during die change; owner: equipment foreman; due April 30.' A hazard with a name and a date can be followed up in weekly meetings, and from that moment safety becomes something you manage. Without an assessment sheet, shop-floor risk stays in the hands of individual skill and caution.
There are four main types, based on timing: an initial assessment, done within a set period after a workplace is established; an ad hoc assessment, done when machinery or equipment is introduced, a process changes, or an accident occurs; a regular assessment, which revisits the initial results every year; and the ongoing assessment added by the 2023 notice revision. Ongoing assessment handles hazards through monthly supervisor meetings and weekly pre-work meetings (TBM), and carrying these out can substitute for ad hoc and regular assessments. Methods aren't limited to the frequency-severity matrix either: simplified approaches such as the three-level risk judgment method or the Key Factor Description method (OPS) are accepted, so a small workplace can complete one on a page or two.
It operates at a different level from pre-work safety checks or job safety analysis. An inspection checks whether set standards are being followed, whereas risk assessment is the procedure that creates those standards in the first place. The hazard identification and improvement procedure required by serious-accident laws can also be satisfied through risk assessment, but the requirement of inspections at least twice a year and implementation of improvement measures still applies. Detailed standards such as frequency and record retention may be amended, so check the latest notice and the guidance from the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency.
The most common failure on the shop floor is an assessment sheet that exists only on paper. A typical example: 200 hazards listed on a template an outside firm prepared, every countermeasure field reading “conduct caution training,” and the owner and deadline columns left blank. After an accident, such a sheet comes back as a record that the risk was known and left in place. Unless you also track the improvement completion rate and the number of overdue items, risk assessment ends up as a file that is re-saved every year with only the date changed.
Hwi KimCEO of HRDIST & Talent Development Systems Consultant
Inwoo LeeExpert in Leadership, Communication & Performance ManagementUnder the Occupational Safety and Health Act, employers must identify hazards and risk factors at their workplace, assess the risks, and take the necessary measures; a public notice sets out the methods and procedures for doing so.
Consider Company A, a second-tier auto parts supplier. Of its 180 employees, 140 work on press and welding lines. Annual revenue is about KRW 42 billion (≈ US$31,423,000). In the past year, it had 3 industrial accidents involving pinched fingers and burns. Its risk assessment sheet was the same file a consulting firm had made three years earlier, and near-miss reports for the year were zero. (Hypothetical example)
- The plant manager, who holds overall responsibility for safety and health, decided to start with three press processes and formed an assessment team of 4 foremen and 6 field workers. At the first meeting someone said, 'Let’s not start by just filling in the form.'
- A press operator with 10 years of experience admitted, 'The fastest way to change a die is to open the guard door and reach in.' That one remark led to 17 hazards missing from the existing assessment sheet, one after another.
- They re-scored using a three-level risk rating method instead of the frequency-severity method, narrowing the list to 9 'High' items, and attached an owner and deadline to all 9—for example, the equipment foreman taking charge of replacing Unit 3’s interlock by April 30.
- They switched to continuous assessment: progress on improvements was reported at a monthly supervisors’ meeting, and each week’s work risks were shared in a weekly TBM (toolbox meeting). They then ran a 15-minute reassessment every time a process changed.
- One year later, 8 of the 9 'high' risks were resolved (an 89% completion rate), near-miss reports rose from 0 to 12 a month, and industrial accidents fell from 3 to 1. The plant manager now opens meetings by asking about overdue items.