Health & Safety in Your Business

When thinking about health and safety in your business, where should you start?

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That depends.

  • If you’ve just started your business and have nothing in place, then getting an audit carried out will give you a full review of the good, the bad and the ugly, and provide you with a list of priority rated tasks so you know where to start.

  • If you already have health and safety procedures in place and have done for the last 2 years, then it’s time to review these. The law states procedures should be reviewed ‘regularly and where necessary’. So, where anything has changed (e.g. processes, equipment, staff etc), or around every year or so, just in case things have changed but also to refresh memories. Don’t forget to communicate the information to employees and get signatures as evidence of this.

  • If you have processes in place but the business has changed and grown, then again, you should go  back to the audit. The audit shouldn’t just be carried out once, it is a tool to evidence safety performance, to demonstrate what has been achieved, and then identify where to go next.

To carry out a health and safety audit, you have two choices:

1 – Do it yourself or ask an employee to take responsibility for Health & Safety.

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) provide a lot of guidance for employers on how to get started and how to fulfil your obligations.  There is a lot of information, but very little around ‘how’ to do this. If you get it wrong, you are responsible and liable. You should also consider that it may take up a lot of time when someone is doing it alongside their ‘day job’ and they may not have the bandwidth to do the task justice.

 

 

2 – Use a Health & Safety Consultant

This is a great solution for many small businesses.  You will get the peace of mind that your health and safety is being managed effectively, and at a much lower cost than if you had to employ someone in-house to do it for you.  Make sure that whoever you choose is suitably competent and preferably registered with the Occupational Safety and Health Consultants Register (OSHCR) which means that they are bound by a code of practice.

 

If you would like any advice about health and safety in your business, just give us a call.

 

Photo by Mikael Blomkvist