Guide - Improving Health and Safety in Business

An overview and tips on how you can maintain good health and safety standards within your organisation through a structured approach to health and safety

Step 1 - Set Your Health & Safety Policy

Your health and safety policy should incorporate and influence all your activities, including the selection of people, equipment and materials, the way work is done and how you design and provide goods and services.

Provide a written policy statementand make it accessible to staff. Detail potential hazards, show that risks have been properly assessed, eliminated or controlled.

Step 2: Organise your staff

Communicate well your policy and follow the tried-and-tested three C's...

Competence: recruitment, training and advisory support.
Control: allocating responsibilities, securing commitment, instruction and supervision.
Co-operation: between individuals and groups.
Communication: spoken, written and visible.

Step 3: Plan and set standards

Plan, plan, plan. This is the key to successful health and safety. Do this by setting objectives, identifying hazards, assessing risks, implementing standards of performance and developing a positive culture.

Planning should provide for:

identifying hazards and assessing risks, and deciding how they can be eliminated or controlled;
complying with the health and safety laws that apply to your business;
agreeing health and safety targets with managers and supervisors;
a purchasing and supply policy which takes health and safety into account;
design of tasks, processes, equipment, products and services, safe systems of work;
procedures to deal with serious and imminent danger;
co-operation with neighbours, and/or subcontractors;
setting standards against which performance can be measured.

Step 4: Measure your health and safety performance

Just like finance, production or sales, you need to measure your health and safety performance to find out if you are being successful. You need to know:

where you are;
where you want to be;
what is the difference - and why.

Step 5: Learn from experience - audit and review

Monitoring provides the information to let you review activities and decide how to improve performance. Audits, by your own staff or outsiders, complement monitoring activities by looking to see if your policy, organisation and systems are actually achieving the right results. They tell you about the reliability and effectiveness of your systems. Learn from your experiences. Combine the results from measuring performance with information from audits to improve your approach to health and safety management.

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