Young and New Workers - Looking for your feedback ....

[Murray Sunstrum]

This is Murray Sunstrum from Encana in Calgary, AB here!

This is Encana's first message in support of a broader conversation on the safety of Young and New Workers.

I personally see WorkSafeBC is a leader in this area, and they took a key step a few years back by introducing a regulatory requirement for a Young and New Worker Orientation. Encana supports this concept as a key first step in protecting workers. Internally, we take this obligation seriously, and have adopted this requirement across our entire Canadian Division - not just in British Columbia. However, we also recognize we are only a part of this challenge. Encana alone uses nearly 2000 onsite contractors in Canada to support our activities.

We have been recently raising awareness internally and in our community of contractors. We've done this by:

1. sharing Encana's recently updated Young and New Worker Orientation form with our contractors. We've refreshed our form and process based on internal feedback from supervisors;
2. sharing a presentation based upon Enform's 2011 Safety StandDown initiative. It deals with Safety Leadership of New and Inexperienced Workers. There are sure are some great resources floating out there!
3. adding emphasis to the young and new worker issue during our Encana's formal worksite inspections and evaluations of contractors; and
4. asking our contractors: What do you do to orientate Young and New Workers that you think is industry-leading or best in class? If they have great ideas, we'd like to hear them. We've asked them to share them with us directly - and HERE at CCOHS's Workscape forum .....

To those of you in the broader Workscape community interested in this issue, I have attached the files related to #1 and #2 above to this posting. I'm also interested in your insights into the same question we posed to our contractors:

What do you do to orientate Young and New Workers that you think is industry-leading or best in class?

I'd also love to hear what other thoughts you have on the safety of Young and New Workers

I'll be dropping by now and then to join in the conversation.... I'm sure not every message will be quite this long.
; )

Murray Sunstrum
Group Lead, Strategic Safety
Encana Corporation

Take a closer look:
www.encana.com
twitter.com/encanacorp
facebook.com/encana
youtube.com/encana

[Don@wildrose]

Hello,
Young and new workers to any jobsite is a concern worth evaluating to the fullest. There are many elements and processes involved in the protection and assurance of a young worker's safety. Leadership, training, perception surveys, mentoring, identification and many others are just some of the elements that would need to incorporated into a organizations management system. What we really need to look at and very closely is the management system itself as you will find that most are very poorly constructed or when properly constructed not supported. The determination of the the inherent risk associated with young workers should be incorporated in the risk assessment, identification and control program, but few such exist.
A lot more can be said, but much more can be done.
Regards,
Don Andrechek
Wildrose Safety Systems

Don Andrechek