What Is the OSHA Safety Champions Program?
OSHA’s new Safety Champions Program (SCP) is a voluntary cooperative to help and recognize employers who build real, functioning safety and health programs. The program is built around seven core elements drawn from OSHA’s Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs, the same practices OSHA uses to define what a compliant safety program actually looks like. Participants move through three progressive steps, earning OSHA recognition at each level. ComplyAuto Safety is built around those elements, which means dealers who are already using the Safety platform have a significant head start before they enroll in the SCP.
Dealers can enroll here. The program is free, self-guided, and open to any dealership. Once enrolled, participants use the Safety Champions Tracker to document progress through each step at their own pace. At any point, you can request a Safety Champion Special Government Employee (SGE) to review your program, answer questions, and provide feedback—you do not have to wait until you think you have completed a step. When you are ready to advance, OSHA assigns an SGE to conduct a formal review and either confirm completion or identify where more work is needed. There is no clock running. Work through the steps at the pace that makes sense for your dealership.
The Three Steps to Recognition
Each step builds on the one before. Participants must continually meet the criteria from completed steps in order to advance to the next step.
1. Introductory
Establish the foundation. Get your core policies, hazard inventory, training plan, and worker reporting in place.
2. Intermediate
Implement and document. Activate inspections, conduct training, investigate incidents, get buy-in and from your workers.
3. Advanced
Evaluate and improve. Conduct trend analysis, build worker-led safety teams, integrate safety into all planning, earn full OSHA recognition.
Element 1: Management Leadership
The Safety Champions Program starts at the top. Before anything else, a dealer needs a written safety and health policy that commits the organization to establishing and maintaining a safety culture for all workers. That policy needs to be communicated to every employee, contractor, and temporary worker on-site.
Beyond the policy, OSHA wants to see management lead by example: a designated safety program manager for the organization, executives visibly participating in safety activities, and safety topics discussed at regular work meetings.
Comply Auto Safety’s Policies & Procedures module provides for the core written programs OSHA is looking for and generates documented records of training, inspections, and incidents that make the management of accountability visible and verifiable.
Element 2: Worker Participation
OSHA’s SCP requires workers to be genuinely involved: reporting hazards, participating in incident investigations, serving on safety committees, and shaping the organizational program from the ground up. Critically, there must be a mechanism for anonymous reporting, and workers must be protected from retaliation for raising safety concerns.
At the Introductory step, dealers need a safety committee, a formal reporting process, and documented communication of workers’ safety rights. At the Intermediate step, workers should be actively involved in inspections and investigations. By the Advanced step, worker-led safety teams should be conducting routine audits and near-miss reviews, and workers should receive regular feedback on how their concerns are being addressed.
ComplyAuto Safety’s QR-based Issue Reporting Stations give workers an immediate and anonymous way to flag hazards and near-misses from anywhere on the lot or in the shop. Reports are documented, timestamped, and tracked, creating the reporting history the SCP requires and giving workers a visible feedback loop on every concern they raise.
Beyond reporting, ComplyAuto Safety’s safety assessments are designed to be used by employees directly—whether for a quick safety snapshot or a full workplace inspection—putting hazard identification in the hands of the people closest to the work.
Elements 3 & 4: Hazard Identification, Assessment, Prevention, and Control
OSHA requires a comprehensive inventory of all workplace hazards—including a full chemical hazard review—documented job safety analyses for every routine task, written procedures for non-routine tasks, and a functioning hazard tracking system that captures what was found, when, and what was done about it.
Hazard prevention means more than having the right policies. It means actionable items where equipment is on a preventive maintenance schedule, that schedule is followed, and the records prove it. It means workers who operate regulated equipment—forklifts, scissor lifts, automotive lifts—are documented as competent operators and not just trained on paper. At the Advanced step, all controls should be reviewed annually and updated whenever tasks, equipment, or conditions change.
ComplyAuto Safety delivers mobile-ready checklists for dealer equipment—lifts, forklifts, tanks—with documented and timestamped inspection records. ComplyAuto Safety’s built-in hazard assessments give employees a structured way to identify and document workplace hazards before they become incidents. The software also provides a dealer-specific digital SDS library. Our new certification management tool issues wallet cards and documents practical evaluations for forklift, scissor lift, automotive lift, and respirator fit testing—proving operator competency in writing.
Element 5: Education and Training
OSHA’s SCP training requirements are specific: every worker needs a documented training plan, new hires must be trained before hazard exposure, training must be in a language and at a literacy level each worker can understand, and training must be verified, not just attended. A completion signature is not enough; OSHA expects knowledge to be assessed and deficiencies addressed with retraining.
By the Intermediate step, dealers should have refresher training running on schedule and a process to ensure new hires are enrolled before exposure to any workplace hazards. At Advanced, training should be provided annually for all safety topics, updated when hazard assessments identify new risks, and progressively formalized for workers with safety responsibilities.
ComplyAuto Safety’s training module automates enrollment in state-required EHS courses with built-in reminders and documented completion records—across all 50 states. The platform tracks every completion, flags gaps, and ensures that no employee goes untrained. For multi-state dealer groups, the 50-state compliance coverage eliminates the manual tracking burden entirely, as each employee will be automatically presented with the relevant state-specific training.
Element 6: Program Evaluation and Improvement
A safety program that is never reviewed stops working. OSHA’s SCP requires dealers to actively monitor performance—injury and illness history, incident trends, worker participation levels, inspection frequency, completion of corrective actions—and use that data to set goals and drive improvement. At the Introductory step, dealers need to pull their OSHA 300 log history and begin tracking leading and lagging indicators. By the Advanced step, trend analysis should happen at least annually across all data sources, with results communicated to workers on a quarterly basis.
This element rewards dealers who have built the infrastructure to collect data, because the data itself is the evaluation. Dealers who have been running ComplyAuto Safety have that infrastructure already put in place.
ComplyAuto Safety’s OSHA Reporting auto-generates OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 forms with built-in accuracy, and its Injury & Illness Wizard captures incident data through guided recordability workflows. Pull your data quarterly, communicate progress to workers, and let the trends drive your safety goals.
Element 7: Coordination with Contractors and Staffing Agencies
Most dealerships work with contractors daily—detail vendors, equipment maintenance crews, lot service companies—and many use staffing agencies for other employee placements. OSHA’s SCP requires a written contractor selection process that includes identifying safety criteria, communicating safety rules to contractors before they arrive on-site, and clear accountability for correcting hazards in contractor work areas. At the Advanced step, contractors must also have a mechanism to report hazards they observe to the dealership.
ComplyAuto Safety’s SDS library and QR code signage ensures contractors have access to hazard information for every chemical they may encounter while on-site. The software’s safety assessments and equipment checklists support pre-work and post-work walkthroughs in contractor areas. Issue reporting can be extended to contractor and staffing agency workers, satisfying OSHA’s Advanced-step requirement directly.
Start Where You Are. Advance from There.
The SCP does not require perfection to begin. The Introductory step is specifically designed for employers who are starting to build, not for employers who already have everything in place. OSHA assigns an SGE to review your progress and provide feedback before confirming each step completion. If your dealership is already using ComplyAuto Safety, you have a significant head start—your training records, inspection history, OSHA logs, incident documentation, and chemical inventory are already there.
Ten thousand dealerships. Forty-three state association endorsements. Fifty-state compliance coverage. On-site mock OSHA audits by Certified Safety Professionals. ComplyAuto Safety was built for dealerships, and it maps directly to every element of the SCP. The Safety Champions Program is OSHA’s invitation to be recognized as a workplace that takes safety seriously, and ComplyAuto Safety can get you there. Schedule a demo to learn more.