OSHA gets a lot of flak over their complex safety standards. What will surprise most of you is that the standards are very simple. They use a common format that describes the problem and the objective of the standard. It lays out rules and methods to reduce the hazard. It tells you how to determine if you have a problem, then steps for solving that problem if you do. Along the way it will address medical issues, healthy work practices and engineering controls. It addresses the need for personal protective equipment and lays out training requirements.

  Basically every standard follows the same procedures. Where is the problem and why is it so complicated? I think it goes back to the safety consultants. I look at how SCI handles a particular issue and how we will address the same issue. Either way works, but they are vastly different. Today there are many consultants serving the industry and each has their own unique approach.

  Let’s move the focus to which works best. Most all compliance programs work well if you follow the recommended steps. I won’t even claim that mine is superior. I think it is a matter of which of the many programs works best for your organization or workplace. My judgement is that programs featuring online training and testing rate well in general industry matters but not so well in mortuary specifics. Compliance Plus has tried to hang our hat on “simplicity” but we still have our share of customers that have problems “getting it”.

  All compliance consultants evolve over the years in an effort to solve problems and put out fires. We used to want experienced embalmers as safety administrators. Today, we have a digital program. We don’t depend on the embalmer to do the training. It is done by me on narrated PowerPoint presentations. As a result, some of our customers have secretaries administer their safety program.

  Today, a single electronic mailing may contain multiple newsletters, documents, and up to five PowerPoint presentations. The person serving as safety officer of our program should be someone that is able to download, organize and manage the digital data they receive.

  As a company that boasted about having a simple program, we run into problems with customers that are not ready to embrace the electronic world. They throw our “Keep It Simple Stupid” compliance concept back at us. What is our response? We try to listen. We try to take it one customer at a time and one issue at a time. We don’t always succeed but we try. When your customer base is large and includes customers with varying skill levels, there will always be issues. There are times when we cannot keep it simple. There are never times where we are too busy to listen to customer concerns.