5 health and safety tools for small businesses

Why is competency so important?

Competency is a mixture of experience, knowledge and skill. Experience to assist the identification of hazards and prediction of accidents. Knowledge of the hazards faced is essential to identify who might be harmed and how. The skill to do something about controlling risk is vital.

Often risks can exist that are not yet legislated for. Legislation often lags behind accidents; governments often want proof there is a problem before they legislate. To be kept safe is every worker’s human right, so competency enables small business to both comply with the law and protect workers from things not yet covered by law. 

Why is risk the key to health and safety success?

Put simply, it could be said that the description of a risk is merely the description of a potential accident. Understanding how accidents might happen provides opportunity to avoid them or reduce the likelihood of them happening. There are five basic questions in a risk assessment:

• What are workers doing?
• What hazards are they exposed to while doing that task?
• What accident is possible?
• What makes the accident predicted more or less likely to happen?
• What can we do to make this accident unlikely to happen?

These questions provide a context for the risk and a discipline to discuss its challenges. It leads the assessor to think about the context of the task and what to do to keep people safe. It’s a thought discipline, a means of gathering evidence that leads management to make decisions that will keep workers safe.

Health and safety in planning and procurement

Understanding health and safety risk assessment in all operational planning is vital. The first principle is to prevent harm. so designing risk out of building design, machinery procurement, and production processes during the design phase is an important step.

Why use health and safety representatives?

It is healthy in any organisation for health and safety knowledge to be shared with the workforce. This provides workers with opportunity to challenge and consequently for management to learn from them. Workers work with hazards every day and usually have a good sense of what safety controls will work and what won’t. Appointing worker representatives for health and safety provides a focus for further training to develop this important part of a safety management system.

Do we need health and safety committees?

Health and safety committees can enable consultation between key managers and workers. It’s not the title of the meeting that is important, it’s how it is used. Too many times health and safety committees start with good intent, but descend into the discussion of trivia. They need to be carefully chaired by a senior member of management with the power to direct action. This demonstrates organisational commitment. The agenda should focus on reviewing and discussing risk assessments and how good risk controls are in practice. The meeting should also be used to learn from accidents.

Summary

The use of these five tools will greatly improve the potential for health and safety success in any small business, regardless of industry. By utilising competency; adapting planning and procurement processes to include safety risk considerations; appointing worker health and safety representatives; and arranging consultation through well led health and safety committees, small business will be successful. They will be able to generate the evidence of good health and safety performance that enables legal defence, encourage stakeholder confidence, and enjoy improved business benefits.