Simplifying Health and Safety Compliance for Small Businesses: Key Steps (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Most small businesses take health and safety onboard mainly to satisfy the law. Wherever you live, the law will require for you to use best practice methods to manage health and safety at the workplace, but that doesn't necessarily need to be an overly complicated thing to do. For most businesses, establishing health and safety systems is actually pretty straightforward. It starts with identifying who is the top management of the business and then accepting that they are ultimately responsible for the health and safety of all the other people at the workplace. For small businesses, it's usually obvious who's the top management. All members of a board of directors and all owners of a business are responsible, even if they rarely visit the worksite. Top management should know and understand the risks and also be involved in the day-to-day management of those risks. They need to lead by example and provide the foundation for a positive safety culture. So how do you actually do that? Well, the simplest way to ensure that you are in compliance with the law is to start by talking to your staff about health and safety. Then make sure that together you've identified, assessed and minimized the risks. This process of risk identification and minimization needs to involve everybody and will form the basis of successful health and safety management. But it's not something you can do once and then forget about. It's important to realize that health and safety is an ongoing effort and should be worked on over time to ensure that your health and safety performance is continually improving. Health and safety compliance requires that you engage with your staff and include everybody in the discussion around health and safety. The main goal of modern health and safety management is to create a positive safety culture, which means that everyone takes health and safety seriously and treats it as part of normal work. Also everyone should be actively encouraged to talk freely about safety or health issues at work and know that they have the right to refuse to do something they feel may be unsafe. Before commencing work at a new site, an employee should be inducted to that site. That means that they're made aware of the risks and the risk controls, as well as how to report hazards, incidents and near misses and what to do in an emergency. They should also be trained to do the work they're asked to do. Details of inductions and training should be kept in a register. In an ideal world, workplaces would be a hundred percent safe and nobody would ever get sick or hurt. But in the real world, accidents happen. No matter how competent and well-trained people are and how well risks are managed, sometimes things go wrong. That's what first aid kits and emergency plans are for. Importantly though, when things do go wrong there are always lessons to be learned. Finding the root cause of an accident as soon as possible after it happens is the best way to start working out how to stop that accident from happening again. By law, all incidents should be recorded in a register and investigated as soon as possible. Similarly, all likely emergency events should be planned for. This might include ensuring that trained first aiders are available on all shifts, that the site has smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and evacuation plans, or procedures for earthquakes, angry customers, robbery, vehicle accidents, chemical spills and so on. These emergency plans should be well understood by everybody and practiced to make sure they are effective. When working with other businesses it's important to understand how the risks of one business may affect another and any other people in the area. This might be a contractor doing work for another business or a more complex situation like a construction site where there may be a few different trades people from different companies working together in the same site. Before work begins, each business should cross-site each other's health and safety systems, have a discussion and come to an agreement about how things will work on that shared job site. Keeping accurate documentation is often seen as the most daunting part of establishing a health and safety system. If you keep it simple and you should keep it simple, your health and safety management system shouldn't take up too much of your time and will quickly become a valuable asset for your business. So that's it. Health and safety compliance isn't that hard really. If you take care of those seven items then you'll be compliant with the law and your workplace will be safer and healthier.