According to the Health and Safety Executive, 27 million working days were lost last year in the UK through illness or injury caused by an event at their workplace.In this context, it’s easy to argue that effective Health and Safety Management is at the core of workplace productivity. Not only that, but if you are a business owner you have a legal responsibility for the health and safety of everyone in your workplace.
Despite this, managing workplace Health and Safety does not need to be as complicated as it may first seem. In fact, by keeping the following five steps in mind you can make the task simple.
Step One: Let Simply-Docs Provide A Helping Hand
To help you create effective Health and Safety management, we’ve created A Guide To Making Health & Safety Simple. In this guide, we’ve broken down the basics of managing workplace Health and Safety step by step and in a way that is clear and easy to understand.
Step Two: Write A Clear Health and Safety Policy
Writing a policy is a great way to start creating a culture of workplace Health and Safety compliance. This is because it defines a set of rules and a clear direction for the employees of your business to follow.
Moreover, writing a clear Health and Safety policy indicates to your staff that you take their well-being seriously. In turn, this can help encourage the adoption of good working practices that have a positive impact upon all areas of your business’s performance.
Step three: Adopt A Systematic Approach To Minimising Risks
The biggest aim of your business’s Health and Safety policy should be to manage risk. In order minimise risks, first you will need to identify them.
To do this you will need to perform a risk assessment of your workplace. Our notes ‘How to Carry Out A Risk Assessment’ will help you with this. Once you have done that, you can ask your employees for their input, as they may notice something you miss.
After you have completed a risk assessment of your business, you can start planning the measures needed to control or ideally eliminate potential risks – for example, introducing new facilities, equipment or tweaking your processes. If risks cannot be controlled through different equipment or a change of the process, you may need to consider introducing protective clothing – PPE.
Make sure that you record the information in one of our Risk Assessment documents and keep a log of every work-related accident or illness, as this will help with spotting any trends.
Step Four: Communicate With Your Employees
Communicating with your employees about health and safety is a legal requirement, but it’s also a great idea, as often they will know more about what goes on in the workplace than you do. In addition, involving your staff in matters regarding health and safety will help to motivate them to work safely and avoid accidents.
Training should form a major part of your Health and Safety-related communications in the workplace. In order for your employees to receive the training that benefits them the most, you may want to consider asking them their opinion on how they think the training should be provided.
Providing your staff with training and communicating with them on a regular basis will help develop a common understanding of the expectation for Health and Safety compliance in your workplace.
Step Five: Review Your Performance
A regular review of your workplace’s overall performance allows you to establish whether your approach to Health and Safety management has been effective.
No workplace stays the same. Whether it’s a change of processes, the use of different equipment or a changeover in staff, things will inevitably change over time. Therefore, reviewing your performance allows you to assess whether the Health and Safety policy reflects your current working environment.
Referring to your risk assessment document and accident book should also be a vital part of reviewing your performance. Reviewing both of these documents will allow you to evaluate the success of the measures you have put in place to manage risk and identify areas where you need to improve.
Do You Need More Help Managing Workplace Health & Safety?
If you find the administrative side of Health and Safety compliance daunting, the Simply-Docs portfolio of business and legal templates can help. Using our portfolio of professionally drafted documents is a cost effective solution for implementing workplace Health and Safety guidelines with speed and accuracy.
So if you need help structuring a Health and Safety Policy/risk assessment, or you need access to template documents for other Health and Safety procedures such as hygiene and fire safety, let Simply-Docs provide a helping hand.
Subscribe to our Health & Safety document folder for just £35.00 (+ VAT) and then you enjoy a year’s unlimited access to every Health & Safety document template you will need.