Health and Safety Systems Evaluation

Health and Safety Systems Evaluation

A short self-assessment to determine the efficiency of your H&S systems
Email
example@example.com
Does your business work in any of the following industries: Construction, Civil Industries, Manufacturing, Transportation, Mining, Forestry & Logging, Infrastructure, Waste Management, Aviation, or related services?*
Does your business have multiple sites and/or mobile operations?*
Does your business implement timely corrective/preventive actions for incidents and hazards?*
Is information on Health and Safety transparent and accessible by all employees? *
Are senior managers well-informed of current health and safety risks throughout the business, and the safety performance of all business departments?*
Does your business conduct regular safety inspections of plant, equipment, vehicles and sites?*
Do health and safety inspections/checklists produce corrective/preventive actions that are followed up and completed?*
Do staff have individualised training plans that cover the specific health and safety risks for their job?*
What does your Health and Safety Manager or Representative spend the majority of their time doing?*

Building trust and respect with key staff, Communicating with and involving everyone in your H&S system, Educating and empowering staff in H&SPaperwork
Do you have an electronic system for reporting health and safety incidents and hazards? And if so, is it easy-to-use and practical?*

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Health and Safety Systems Self-assessment Score
Recommendations based on your answers
As a business operating in a 'high-risk' industry, injury is more likely, and there is more scrutiny from Worksafe. Having a robust health and safety system, and documenting your effort, is extremely important to demonstrating due diligence to avoid prosecution.
Working across different sites and locations increases your health and safety risk by making supervision more difficult, and making your health and safety performance less visible to senior management. Having in place a live dashboard of your health and safety performance will help you to identify risks and areas for improvement.
A good health and safety system should be regularly identifying areas for improvement and actioning these. This can be called corrective/preventive action or continuous improvement. Whatever you call it, there should be clearly defined tasks assigned to key staff to implement. It is up to you to ensure these tasks are completed in a timely manner to prevent the occurrence of an injury due to an absent or improper defence.
The Health and Safety at Work Act requires PCBUs to consult and engage staff in health and safety matters. To do this, staff need to first be aware of the risks in the business and the systems currently in place to control these. This is best achieved by having an online 'portal' where staff can access company procedures, hazard and risk registers, and other health and safety information that involve them.
Conducting regular inspections across activities, tasks, materials, equipment, tools and the work environment is crucial to identify all risks in a workplace, and to identify areas for improvement. This is a task best assigned to multiple employees across different sites, so you can engage staff in health and safety at the same time as identifying risks. Inspections can be tedious and time-consuming when done on paper, having an online system to capture inspections and related actions automates the process by: collecting photos of findings, automatically generating corrective action plans, sharing findings with key personnel via email, adding finding to your live dashboard to track progress, and allowing inspections to use their mobile devices to do inspections quickly and on-the-go.
If your health and safety inspections and incident reports do not have associated preventive/corrective actions implemented, then more than likely you have repeated incidents and hazards in your business that are not being addressed. Do not fall into the trap of having a 'tick-box' health and safety system where reports are filled out and fall into an abyss. This will create a poor safety culture where staff will disengage from your health and safety system.
Health and safety regulations are clear, all staff must be competent for their roles. As an employer, you must ensure that your staff have the right skills and training for the job before assigning them a task. Every individual's background and role can be different, so it makes sense to have individualised training plans to ensure the right training is provided and maintained throughout the course of employment. An online training register that includes individualised training plans, training progress, and allowing staff to access training documents and complete training on their mobile devices could save you a lot of time and headache to fulfil this requirement.
People are the most important asset in any business, and in order to effect change in health and safety you must invest in people by building trust and respect, communicating, involving, educating and empowering staff in health and safety. Health and safety should not be primarily an administrative task made up of filling forms and ticking boxes, it should be focussed on encouraging and educating staff to perform their jobs safely. If you are spending more time on paper-work than on people, then introducing some automation to your health and safety system can help to complete this paper-work and free you up for what really matters, your staff.
If your health and safety system is paper-based, then it likely has low accessibility and is likely to be out-dated. Health and safety software is common, and useful to save time with record keeping and document control. However, not all health and safety software is created equal. When selecting the right health and safety software, it is essential that you ensure it is easy-to-understand and has the tools you need. Everyone in your organisation should be able to access your health and safety software and be able to access the form, procedure, or page they need within 2-clicks. If it is easy, staff will use it, and the more you engage your staff, the safer your workplace will become.
As the business owner, manager or company director, it’s your legal obligation to make health and safety part of the day-to-day running of your business. Being well-informed of your business safety performance can be a massive undertaking when there are multiple locations, activities, or projects going on at once. The most effective and efficient method to be well-informed to make good health and safety decisions is to have an online health and safety system with a dashboard that can give you a quick and quick overview of what's going on, and to help you find trends and to track progress of health and safety improvements.
Should be Empty:

Health and Safety Systems Evaluation

Recommendations based on your answers

As a business operating in a 'high-risk' industry, injury is more likely, and there is more scrutiny from Worksafe. Having a robust health and safety system, and documenting your effort, is extremely important to demonstrating due diligence to avoid prosecution.