If you have a business up and running, you will have to devote a lot of time to ensure that you have met all the rules and regulations around health and safety. It does not make a difference if you have one staff member, or 10,000 the rules apply to every business.
It is in your best interest to think of everything and protect yourself for any eventuality. You have to implement strategies to reduce hazards and dangers. Here are some ideas to get you going:
Health and safety rep
If your business is of a reasonable size, it is worth your while to appoint someone to be the health and safety representative. You may need to put this person through some formal training to better take on this role as it is essential, so choose the person wisely.
This may become their full-time job, or it may be something they perform alongside their ordinary role, depending on the needs of your organisation. The representation will ensure that the rest of the staff are aware of the rules and that certain procedures are adhered to. They can work with you or independently to come up with site-specific, internal rules that will help mitigate any foreseeable issues.
Create a health and safety policy
To ensure that you and your staff are fully aware of all the rules and regulations, both governmental and internal, it is a good idea to get it all written down in a business policy.
First off, if you have more than five employees, you need a policy. Also, if you make one, it will help you see what needs to be done, and it will give the staff and managers a guide on best practices.
Once created, it is easy to take out and use to train staff, and it is easy to update and add site-specific instructions. For example, you may need an appendix as a guide to keeping warehouse visitors safe.
Risk assessment
There are many reasons why you should care about the health, safety, and wellbeing of your staff to both protect them and to protect yourself. When you create the health and safety policy, however, it is all about mitigating risk to the business.
Anything that could cause a potential hazard needs to be looked at. That includes things like bumps in the carpet, or little dips in the flooring, as this is a slip, trip or fall risk.
So, you and your representative should go around the workplace and look for issues and make a list of them. Think about how someone may be harmed and what kind of person they would be, a dip in carpet, could be a lady in heels, for example.
Once you have all your risks, evaluate them and look at how you are going to resolve them. You could get all the staff to look for issues and that way you can be sure that you have found most of them. However, always be on the lookout for more potential riks.
This is a collaborative post.
