Short Service Employees
Hello Safety Knights, hope you can help. Is it a requirement of OSHA to have some kind of physical identifier for short service employees? We have a mentorship program where SSE are paired up with a lead teach for at least 6 months before placed out on their own, There are 30, 60, and 90 day check ins with management along the way and they are never put on a job alone. However we do not make them wear anything special indicating they are a SSE. Is that a requirement?
This comes up because I just went through the ISN Ravs audit (IYKYK) and we did not identify out SSE and we got "dinged" for it. If this is something I need to do I will but not sure how it will work for our business and industry, We are fire protection service and repair.
Comments (12)
Definitely not an OSHA requirement.
Did they want something like wearing a special colored hardhat?
We always did different colored hard hats. Like Tim mentioned, it's not an OSHA requirement - just a company preference. We used it to ensure SSEs weren't alone operating certain equipment, dealing with certain chemicals, etc.
Being on the shorter side I felt slightly attacked
I am curious as, we use sub contractors a lot, we have subcontractor management programs. Our New employees are normally experienced in the work but we have a shadowing process. We don't currently have an way of identifying new hires. Regular workers wear uniforms and our subs do not.
I love learning a little more and more every time I pop onto this site.
When I was in the Fire Department, our probationary firefighters would have a bright orange helmet shield to identify them as probationary.
I don't really see a huge benefit to giving different colored hard hats to SSE, unless you have a crap load of employees that people need to be able to quickly differentiate experience levels. That's just me though - sounds like a chore.
Not an OSHA requirement, but a great idea in my opinion! My last employer we had new employees, and temporary employees wear hi-vis orange vests. We encouraged our fulltime employees to assist these people. All visitors were required to wear hi-vis chartreuse vests while in the plant, this included all Corporate execs and customers. I once had to hand our CEO of our $25 Billion company (300 plants) a vest and ask him to wear it. All employees were required to wear hi-vis vests when in the Warehouse and Shipping, the only place we allowed the unrestricted operation of PITS.
In 1976 as a new Foundry Supervisor we required "probbie" employees to wear yellow hard hats. Regular hourly production employees wore green, Maintenance & Pattern and Die - blue, Electricians - Red , Technicians - grey, PIT drivers - orange, and all Supervisors and Managers - dark grey (with our last names over the brim in red). All helmets had the NSC green cross sticker on the right side and the company logo on the left. We were a strong UAW plant and did not have Temp employees and had to be very careful with contractors.