​Workforce Safety Guide

Successful safety cultures are led from the top, where your actions and attitudes send a message to your workers that you are serious about their health and safety. Here are five simple steps to manage your work health and safety in your business.

Step 1: TALK WITH YOUR TEAM, Effective consultation encourages greater awareness of issues and can lead to improved safety outcomes. Seeking workers input when making decisions shows them that you take their health and safety seriously. This includes concerns about your workers well-being because mental health is as important as physical health. Follow up on your workers suggestions and make improvements with a record of safety discussions.

STEP 2: MANAGING HAZARDS, Part of managing health and safety in your workplace is controlling the risks. To do this you will need to accurately identify potential hazards. Having identified potential hazards, you'll need to first consider if they can be eliminated. If this is not possible, then consider the risks involved and put practicable measures in place to control them.

STEP 3: MAINTAINING A SAFE WORKPLACE, It is everyone's responsibility to maintain a safe workplace. Regular communications between management and staff is crucial to keeping safety a priority. Add safety as an item to your regular meetings so staff feel comfortable bringing up any issues as they arise.

STEP 4: KEEPING RECORDS, Written records of your work health and safety activities, near misses and incidents are important for your business. These records can help demonstrate what you have done to manage safety in your workplace. This can be important if an incident occurs requiring investigation.

STEP 5: CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, Managing and improving health and safety needs to be ongoing. Safety processes and operation evolve with time, and workers and equipment can come and go, changing the risks in your workplace. When you actively seek to identify hazards, inform, train and supervise your team, you can be confident that you are managing the risks and the people exposed to them.

With these five simple steps you can successfully manage the work health and safety in your business. That's all for today, onwards and upwards professionals. Good bye.