One of the difficult questions that OH&S managers face is – “Do we need a written procedure for [some process]?” The dilemma is that although written procedures are a necessary part of an occupational safety and health management system – if you create too many formal procedures your OHSMS becomes complex, cumbersome and unwieldy.
One of my favorite resources for answering this question is an article in the October 2009 Quality Progress Magazine that sets out a nifty tool for making this decision – a 2 x 2 matrix for deciding whether or not to standardize a process. Although the example given in this article – Building a Consensus – is for a quality system process, it can be easily adapted to making standardization decisions in an OH&S management system.