Safety Compliance Insider 2011 Yearbook
What exactly is a YEARBOOK and why do you need one to keep your company in compliance with OHS and other health and safety requirements—especially if you’re already a Safety Compliance Insider subscriber?
What’s a YEARBOOK?
Let’s take the first question first. The Safety Compliance Insider YEARBOOK reformats, reorganizes and refreshes the materials that appeared in the newsletter over the past 12 months in a way that makes those materials more valuable. It’s not just a repackaging of the same information in the newsletter—it includes original material that wasn’t published in the newsletter last year. There are more than 45 pages of Bonus Materials, including analysis of legal issues that safety coordinators must confront even though they fall outside the realm of traditional health and safety management, such as environmental laws and employment issues that overlap with OHS program management.
For example, the human rights laws bar employers from discriminating against workers based on their religion. But certain religious practices, such as wearing a turban or having a beard, may interfere with the effective use of PPE.
The YEARBOOK format allows us to expand our coverage into these and similar issues that don’t necessarily fit into the pages of a safety compliance newsletter, such as the traps to avoid when setting dress codes, compliance with environmental codes of practice, avoiding liability when serving alcohol at holiday parties, ensuring that flu pandemic measures don’t violate workers’ privacy, handling environmental emergencies and much more.
But the added value of the YEARBOOK isn’t simply the bonus material. It’s the way all of the information has been organized.
Why Do You Need a YEARBOOK?
And that brings us to the second question we posed above: Why do you need a YEARBOOK? The answer to that question is rooted in the very essence of the Insider. The Insider isn’t just about information. Now a days, safety coordinators can get all of the compliance information they want from the internet—often for free.
But getting information isn’t enough to solve real problems. That information has to be processed, analyzed and applied to your company’s day-to-day operations. Safety coordinators need to understand not only what the law says but also what it means. For example, the information about due diligence on a government website will tell you that you must take “reasonable steps” to protect your workers to avoid being fined for safety violations. However, it won’t—and can’t—tell you what “reasonable steps” are. And this information is exactly what you need to comply with the law and avoid prosecutions, fines and other penalties.
It’s precisely this in-depth analysis that the Safety Compliance Insider newsletter provides. The YEARBOOK delivers the same value but in a different way. What you’re getting in this YEARBOOK is a year’s worth of how-to, practical analysis from the past 12 months (plus the Bonus Material) organized to enable you to process the information more effectively and efficiently. The YEARBOOK transforms the uniquely valuable information, analysis and implementation strategies provided by the Insider into a single coherent reference source, which translates into a better and more cost-effective OHS program.
But what does a YEARBOOK do that your newsletter subscription doesn’t? The advantage of a monthly newsletter is that you get the latest news and analysis that’s based on the “hottest” topics in the safety community. The disadvantage is that you get the information one month at a time. By the time you read, say, that article on emergency plans for confined spaces in the July issue, you may have already forgotten the February article on identifying confined spaces in your workplace. As a result, you may miss the connections between the two stories.
The YEARBOOK is the cure for the forest-from-the-trees syndrome. By organizing the material into chapters based on topic, the YEARBOOK enables you to see the relationship among stories and put them into a broader context.
The element of context has actual practical importance. After all, the law is a set of broadly worded rules that must be applied in the heat of the moment based on the particular circumstances of a situation. The great thing about the Insider is that it relates legal principles to practical context. The great thing about the YEARBOOK is that it enriches your understanding of these principles by putting these stories into context.
We plan to publish a new YEARBOOK each year. When viewed together, these annual YEARBOOKs will enable safety coordinators to spot compliance trends and, more importantly, make practical adjustments to their OHS programs in accordance with the evolution of the OHS law.
In short, if you like the newsletter, you’re going to love the YEARBOOK.
The Online Toolbox
The YEARBOOK is a great investment for another reason. When you buy the YEARBOOK, you’re not only getting all of the content that ran in the Insider in 2010 and all of the Bonus Material but also FREE access to www.OHSInsider.com for three months. Plus, you get a special code you can use to download ALL of the Model Tools in the YEARBOOK from the website—even after your free three month trial is over.
We’re confident that the YEARBOOK will make your job as safety coordinator easier.
