This essay is a plan for building good safety practices into an organization. Identify a company, nonprofit organization, or government agency with which you are familiar. Write an essay in standard paragraph form, with no tables, graphs, or bulleted lists. Use APA style. Consult the posted sample of an APA-styled paper for guidance.
Company Overview
Name and describe your company. Explain what industry it is in, what product or service it offers, who its customers are (in terms of their motivation to patronize this company-what do they want or need?), and how it delivers or makes available its product or service. Then word the same elements into a coherent mission statement.
Current Situation
Describe enough safety issues to demonstrate the company's current safety situation. You may want to focus on one area alone, such as warehouse operations, shipping, customer space, or back-office processes. Include some mention of OSHA, including how or whether your company falls within OSHA jurisdiction. Note other safety regulators as well, such as state agencies.
Provide a rationale for the company to adopt or alter its safety management processes. Try to be more specific than merely saying that the company can afford to be safer. For example, you may give an indication of the cost of illnesses or injuries in terms of lost productivity, healthcare insurance premiums, and the effects of injuries on workers' compensation premiums.
Safety Standards and Outcomes
Based on your observations of the company's current safety condition (or that of the activity or unit that you have chosen to address), describe what the company's updated safety standards and objectives will be, in those same areas. Then explain the best ways to measure the company's effectiveness at adhering to optimal safety management practices going forward.
Instituting the New Safety Standards
Explain how you will move the company (or the selected activity or unit of the company) to the new safety standards and objectives. Provide at least one strategy (i.e., a plan in summary form) to support each objective. For example, mandating personal protective gear is one way to reduce injuries resulting from the use of power tools. Training will inevitably be a part of your plan.
STANDARDS
The minimum length is 2,000 words (excluding title page, reference section, and any quoted portions). There is no upper limit. Use correct, formal English (e.g., no contractions, colloquial expressions, or quirky comma-phobic stream-of-consciousness meanderings). Above all, avoid duplicating long strings of words from outside sources (a.k.a. plagiarism). Cite the textbook, an outside book source that explains OSHA standards (consider Google Books for that), and at least four scholarly journal articles (with named authors and more than one page each).