Health and safety compliance is very important across the workplace. Although there can be health and safety strategies that help to implement policies across the board, these will not have an effect in the workplace if employees are not aware of them and make an effort to improve health and safety. There’s also evidence out there to suggest a good health and safety compliance system can also have a positive effect on an individual’s financial situation, due to mitigating the risk of needing medical care physically and mentally. There are a few steps that can be taken to improve health and safety as a whole in the workplace.
As an overview, the 5 steps are:
- Identifying hazards and assessing risks.
- Implement Control.
- Communicate and train.
- Monitor and review.
- Establish a health and safety management system.
Keep on reading to discover how these 5 steps can help improve health and safety compliance in 2023:
What are the 5 steps?
Identify hazards and assess risks: This involves conducting a thorough assessment of your workplace to identify potential hazards and evaluate the risks associated with them. This could include trip hazards on the floor to your employees or customers. From here, all employees should be notified of any hazards and implement strategies that can mitigate these risks. If all employees are aware of the potential hazards, then there’s a greater chance they will be mitigated by improving health and safety compliance.
Implement controls: Once you have identified the hazards and assessed the risks, you need to put measures in place to control those risks. This might include providing protective equipment, implementing safe work practices, or installing safety equipment such as guards or barriers.
Communicate and train: It’s important to ensure that all employees are aware of the hazards and risks in their work environment and are trained on how to work safely. This might involve providing information, instruction, or supervision, as well as ongoing training to keep employees up-to-date on new procedures and safety protocols. To achieve this, an implementation handbook or document could be made to implement controls across the business.
Monitor and review: Ongoing monitoring and review of your health and safety practices are essential to ensure that they are effective and that any necessary changes are made. This might involve conducting regular safety audits, collecting data on injuries and accidents, and soliciting feedback from employees. As time moves on, new hazards and risks can arise therefore it’s important to always monitor and review multiple times per year.
Establish a health and safety management system: Implementing a formal health and safety management system can help you to effectively coordinate and oversee all of your health and safety activities. This might involve establishing clear roles and responsibilities, setting goals and objectives, and implementing policies and procedures. If roles are created, as a part of the monitor and review process employees can review if their health and safety goals and objectives are met. This also helps to have effective time management.
This article has hopefully given you insight as to how you can improve health and safety compliance for you and your employees. It’s important to remember that you don’t need to implement all these steps at once to improve health and safety across your company. If it’s hard to implement these steps, encouraging your employees to be aware of potential hazards and risks will have a significant impact on compliance.
