When safety teams decide which jobs to analyze, the instinct is to start where injuries have already happened. OSHA's Job Hazard Analysis publication (OSHA 3071) supports that, but it also lists two criteria that are easy to overlook: jobs with the potential for severe or disabling injury even when there is no history of incidents, and jobs where one simple human error could lead to a severe outcome.
In high-risk industries, energy isolation, work at height, confined space entry and heavy lifts may carry a clean record and fatal potential at the same time. A JHA for those tasks breaks the job into steps, identifies the hazards at each step and works through the hierarchy of controls before settling on procedures and PPE.
Two practical points tend to make the difference. First, involve the people who do the work; OSHA notes they have a unique understanding of the job. Second, keep the template short. A ten-page JHA is more likely to be signed than read.
Outside North America, the same method can help employers meet task-level risk assessment duties such as those in Great Britain's Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. For the full method, priority criteria and a sample template, see this piece on running a job hazard analysis on high-consequence tasks.