A HIRARC document can be fully completed, properly reviewed, and technically compliant — and still fail to represent the actual hazards on the floor, simply because one of its Work Activity lines was written too broadly. This is one of the most common and least visible gaps in an otherwise well-run HIRARC system.
One Line, Five Jobs
At a distribution centre, a HIRARC listed “Forklift operation” as a single Work Activity — one row, with one set of identified hazards, one set of controls, and one Medium risk rating covering all of it.
In practice, that one line covered five distinct jobs performed by the same forklift on the same shift: loading, reversing through a pedestrian zone, refuelling, operating on a ramp, and working near a mezzanine edge. Each of these carries a materially different hazard profile. Reversing through a pedestrian zone is a struck-by risk. Refuelling is a fire and fuel-handling risk. Working near a mezzanine edge is a fall-related risk for anything or anyone that could go over the edge. Combined into a single Work Activity line, these five different risk levels were averaged into one Medium rating — and the sub-task that was actually the highest-risk part of the job disappeared into that average.
Why This Happens Even in Well-Prepared HIRARCs
HIRARC’s eight-column structure — Work Activity, Hazard, Consequences, Existing Risk Control, Risk Evaluation, Additional Risk Control, Risk Re-evaluation, Person in Charge — is designed to be thorough at the level of detail it’s written at. The structure does not enforce a specific resolution for the Work Activity column. A single broad line like “Forklift operation” is not a mistake in format. It is a resolution choice, made for practical reasons — brevity, familiarity, matching how the job is described in an organisation chart — that has a direct consequence for how hazards are represented underneath it.
The document is not wrong on its face. Every hazard technically identified is a real hazard. The problem is that identifying five hazards under one activity line, rather than five separate lines each with its own rating, hides the variance between them. A reviewer scanning the HIRARC sees one Medium-rated activity, not a Medium-rated activity that is actually an average of a High-risk struck-by scenario and four lower-risk tasks.
What Happens After an Incident
When an incident occurs during one of the sub-tasks hidden inside a broad Work Activity line, the corrective action commonly written is “retrain the operator on forklift safety” — a fix aimed squarely at the person, for a gap that lived entirely in how the document was structured. Retraining someone on a Work Activity line that was never granular enough to name the specific hazard that caused the incident does not touch that hazard. It repeats the same broad instruction that failed to prevent the incident the first time, because the instruction was never specific to begin with.
The Practical Fix
Correcting this requires no new methodology — only a different resolution when writing the Work Activity column. Each genuinely distinct sub-task within a broader job role should receive its own line, with its own hazard identification, its own controls, and its own risk rating, wherever those sub-tasks carry meaningfully different hazard profiles. “Forklift operation” becomes five lines: loading, reversing in pedestrian zones, refuelling, ramp operation, and mezzanine-edge work. Each can then be assessed, controlled, and rated on its own terms, and the highest-risk sub-task becomes visible instead of averaged away.
Tulis setiap sub-tugas secara berasingan dalam HIRARC anda — jangan gabungkan semuanya di bawah satu baris “Aktiviti Kerja.”
Checking Your Own HIRARC for This Gap
Look at the busiest Work Activity line in your current HIRARC — the one covering the widest range of tasks under a single job title. Count how many genuinely different sub-tasks are actually happening under that one line, and ask whether each carries a meaningfully different hazard. If the answer is yes, the highest-risk sub-task among them may be sitting inside a rating that was calculated as an average, not as its own assessment.
Want a HIRARC process that catches Work Activity lines drawn too broadly before an incident does? Cikgu Barrier’s Risk Assessment That Works program teaches teams how to write HIRARC documents at the resolution that actually represents the hazards on the floor — not just the resolution that’s fastest to complete. Available as a public workshop or in-house delivery across Malaysia.