FLHAs that actually work: a field guide for supervisors

Ask an OHS officer or a COR auditor which single document they read first after an incident: the FLHA for the task that went wrong. It’s the record that shows whether your crew actually looked before they started — or whether your safety system is a morning ritual of ticking boxes in the truck.

Where FLHAs come from

The legal root is the employer’s hazard assessment duty. In Alberta, OHS Code Part 2 (ss. 7–9) requires assessing a work site for existing and potential hazards before work begins, repeating the assessment when the work site or work changes, involving affected workers, and recording the results. Other jurisdictions impose the same duty in their own words.

Formal (baseline) assessments cover the predictable hazards of a job. The FLHA exists because real work happens in conditions no office assessment predicted: the wind picked up, the ground thawed, another contractor showed up, the spotter called in sick. It’s the last look before energy meets people.

What a real FLHA contains

• The task, specifically. “Change out pump P-104 discharge valve” — not “mechanical work.”
• Hazards as they exist today, here. “Line may hold residual pressure; icy lease road; overhead crane working same bay” — not “pinch points, slips, trips.”
• A control for every hazard, and the honest hierarchy: eliminate or engineer where possible; PPE is the last resort, not the answer key.
• Crew sign-on. Everyone doing the task, not just the foreman — signatures mean the conversation happened.
• Reassessment triggers. New crew member, weather change, scope change, near miss → stop, reassess, re-sign.

Why most FLHAs are worthless — and how to tell

Every experienced safety person knows the pattern: the same three hazards copied every morning, completed in ninety seconds at 6:58 AM, “be careful” listed as a control. Pencil-whipping isn’t laziness — it’s what happens when crews learn nothing ever comes back from the paper. The tells:

• Completion time under a minute
• Identical hazards/controls day after day, task after task
• Weak language: “be careful,” “watch out,” “all good,” “same as usual”
• No site-specific hazards on a medium/high-risk job
• Blank reassessment sections through a day the weather turned

These tells are detectable — it’s exactly what Vigil’s FLHA quality scoring does automatically: too-fast completions, copy-paste answers and weak language get flagged for supervisor review instead of filed and forgotten.

Making crews take it seriously

1. Close the loop visibly. When an FLHA surfaces a real hazard, something must happen — a fix, a work order, an answer. Crews pencil-whip systems that never respond.
2. Score quality, not completion. “100% of FLHAs done” is a vanity metric. Review the flagged ones; coach on specifics.
3. Make the good ones the standard. Read a genuinely good FLHA at the toolbox talk. Crews calibrate to what gets noticed.
4. Kill the friction. If the form takes 20 minutes of duplicate scribbling, you’ve engineered the pencil-whipping yourself. Phone-based, template-driven, offline-capable — the FLHA should be faster to do well than to fake.
5. Supervisors sign the risky ones. High-risk tasks should route to a supervisor before work starts — which is only practical when the FLHA is digital and the supervisor is notified in real time.

The audit angle

COR auditors and officers don’t just check that FLHAs exist — they read a sample against the incident record and the work performed. A stack of identical, spotless FLHAs from the week of a serious incident is worse than gaps: it’s documented evidence your assessment system is fiction. Quality beats volume, every time it matters.