Hello everybody and welcome back! As the last Excellence newsletter article of 2021, we wanted to finish off this series and spend some time discussing the final step of implementation, the Acknowledge Successes and Improvements Step.
Often overlooked, the Acknowledge Successes and Improvements Step is a mandatory requirement of your Excellence program’s implementation. This step requires you to look for any deficiencies and create a documented Action Plan based on the results of your Evaluation Step. If no deficiencies are found, your organization is to take the time to acknowledge and celebrate what is working.
It is important to remember that the identification of deficiencies during the Evaluation step is a positive experience and you will not be penalized by the WSIB as a result of their identification. Deficiencies are a common outcome of implementation and they also serve as proof that your Evaluation Step was effective.
If a deficiency is identified, the WSIB will not be looking to see how your organization fixed the deficiency. Instead, they will be looking to see how your organization plans to correct the deficiency through the use of a documented Action Plan. At minimum, the Action Plan should include the identified deficiency(s), a 2-3 sentence plan on how the deficiency will be created, who is responsible for implementing the action plan as well as a reasonable timeline for completion.
We must emphasize that the timeline for completion must be reasonable and related to the action plan itself. For example, if your organization had selected the Risk Assessment topic and your Evaluation found that the completed Risk Assessment was not posted on the Health and Safety board, it would be unreasonable to set a timeline for completion at 2 months from now. However, if the Evaluation found that your Risk Assessment did not include Workplace Violence and Harassment hazards, it would be reasonable to set a timeline for completion at 2 months from now so that the Risk Assessment could be recompleted.
In the event that no deficiencies are identified during the Evaluation, it is important to take the time and acknowledge the success of your implementation. The acknowledgement of success could be an email to all employees thanking them for their efforts in implementing the topics and potentially some sort of reward, like a pizza-party or some other celebration.