If you run sites in more than one country, you have had the argument about which of these is correct. The short answer is that most of them describe the same control, and the name reflects who wrote your procedures rather than any difference in method.
Below: what each term means, where you will hear it, and a template you can take. Then the part that matters more, which is why a crew that believes in the assessment still ticks it through.
What is a job hazard analysis?
OSHA defines it as "a technique that focuses on job tasks as a way to identify hazards before they occur. It focuses on the relationship between the worker, the task, the tools, and the work environment." That comes from OSHA publication 3071, revised in 2002, which remains the reference document most procedures are built on.
What is the difference between a JSA and a JHA?
None, in method. OSHA uses Job Hazard Analysis in its own publication. Much of industry uses Job Safety Analysis for the identical technique. Some employers draw a distinction, most often that a JSA covers a whole job and a JHA covers a single task. That split is a house convention rather than a standard.
If your sites use both terms for the same thing, they are not wrong. They inherited different procedure writers.
The ten names, mapped
Usage varies by employer more than by country, so treat the regions below as where you are most likely to hear a term rather than where it is exclusive to.
| Name | Short | Where you will hear it | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job Safety Analysis | JSA | US, widely exported | Break the job into steps, identify hazards per step, set controls. Usually written in advance and reviewed on the day |
| Job Hazard Analysis | JHA | US, OSHA's own term | Same method. The term used in OSHA 3071 |
| Take 5 | n/a | Australia, New Zealand, mining and construction | A short personal check at the point of work, on a pocket card, immediately before starting |
| Field Level Risk Assessment | FLRA | Canada, oil and gas, utilities | Completed by the crew at the work location on the day |
| Field Level Hazard Assessment | FLHA | Canada, Alberta especially | The same thing under a different employer's wording |
| Pre-Task Plan | PTP | US construction and heavy civil | Crew-level plan completed before the shift or the task |
| Point of Work Risk Assessment | POWRA | UK, rail and construction | A check made at the location once the crew can see the actual conditions |
| Last Minute Risk Assessment | LMRA | Netherlands, Northern Europe, offshore | The final check immediately before starting, after everything else is signed |
| Stop, Look, Assess, Manage | SLAM | UK, offshore, utilities | A prompt rather than a form. Often printed on a hard hat sticker |
| Tailboard or tailgate meeting | n/a | US utilities and line work | A crew briefing at the vehicle before work, which often carries the assessment |
And the one that is not on this list:
| Toolbox talk | A short briefing on a safety topic, delivered to a group. It is training, not assessment. It gets confused with the above because both happen at the start of a shift |
|---|
The practical consequence of the table: two of your sites can run identical controls and report them under names that do not reconcile in your safety system. Anyone trying to compare assessment completion across a group has met this.
How do you conduct a job hazard analysis?
OSHA's method, in seven steps.
- Involve the people who do the job. They understand the task in a way an assessment written at a desk will not capture.
- Review what has already gone wrong. Past injuries, illnesses, losses and near misses at the site.
- Walk the job with the crew. Discuss the hazards and possible controls before writing anything.
- Rank which jobs get assessed first. Order by likelihood and severity of consequence.
- Break the job into steps. Observe the work and record each action, without excessive detail.
- Identify the hazards in each step. What can go wrong, how, what contributes, how likely.
- Set controls in order of preference. Engineering controls, then administrative controls, then PPE.
Step seven is the one that gets inverted in practice. PPE is the cheapest control to specify and the easiest to audit, so assessments drift toward it. An assessment whose controls are mostly PPE has usually skipped steps three and five.
A JSA template you can take
Download the template. No email required.
Three columns for the analysis itself: job step, hazard, control. Header fields for the job, location, date, crew and the person who signed it. A second tab maps the regional names above onto the same three columns, so a group standard can accept a take 5 from one site and an FLRA from another without either crew relearning a form.
Two deliberate omissions. There is no risk matrix, because most operators already have one and a generic five-by-five will fight it. There is no severity scoring either.
Why do crews tick through assessments they believe in?
Nobody who runs one thinks the control is wrong. A crew stopping to think in front of the job is the whole point, and it works. The problem sits in the paperwork wrapped around it.
The form was built around the fields the system needs. The crew has to convert the job into categories before recording anything. That conversion is work, and it happens while everyone is standing in PPE waiting to start.
Repetition kills attention. The fourth identical assessment on the same task in a week gets less thought than the first. This is a known property of any repeated check and no wording fixes it.
The paperwork competes with the window. A point-of-work check is designed for a few minutes. When it routinely takes longer than the crew has before the plant is available, it gets completed after the fact, which removes the only thing it was for.
Nobody reads them. Assessments that go into a filing system and never come back out teach the crew that the exercise is for the auditor. Sites where a supervisor visibly acts on something raised in an assessment see a different standard of completion, and there is no substitute for that.
Can a crew complete a pre-task assessment without a form?
Yes, and the structured record still exists.
Tandm lets a worker work through the assessment by speaking or typing, in his own language, at the job. Tandm asks for what is missing, shows him the completed version before anything is recorded in his name, and writes the structured record into the safety system the company already runs. He never opens a form.
The name on the record can stay whatever your site calls it. A take 5 in Queensland and an FLRA in Alberta can produce the same structure without either crew changing what they call it.
Book a demo and bring one of your own assessments. Twenty minutes.
Sources
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Job Hazard Analysis, OSHA 3071, revised 2002. osha.gov (PDF)