5 Tips for Managing Health and Safety at Workplace

As a business owner, you are responsible for ensuring that the health and safety of your employees and other stakeholders of your company is preserved. With that, you must provide effective management practices to help protect the health, safety and well-being of the people. More so, there are a lot of advantages you would derive as a business owner when you put the necessary control measures in place.

Incorpuk in this guide, explains the 5 tips for managing health and safety at the workplace and lots more.

What are health and Safety Management Practices?

Health and safety management practices are the strategies, guidelines or control measures put in place by a company to preserve the health, safety and well-being of the people. It also involves the policies guiding the company employee safety, the training and materials provided to mitigate against risk and hazards and so on.

Legislation on Health and Safety Management

As a business owner within the UK, you need to understand the requirements of the health and safety legislation and this is majorly the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. This legislation explains the health and safety requirements that companies within the UK must fulfil.

The Act also requires that every business owner must protect the health and safety of employees, customers, suppliers, investors, clients, visitors and every other stakeholder of the company. However, some categories of self-employed individuals are exempted in as much as their business operations don’t have any potential risk to them and their community.

In all, it is important that you follow the requirements of the Health and Safety Act as that doesn’t only keep you in compliance but also shows to your employees and customers that your company cares about them.

5 Tips for Managing Health and Safety at Workplace

Managing health and safety in a workplace is pretty straightforward. Depending on the size and nature of your business or company, the amount of task, effort and time that will be needed to effectively manage health and safety will vary. However, the same steps will still need to be followed. Here are the 5 tips you would require for your workplace health and safety management.

1. Create a health and safety team

When planning on your company's health and safety needs, one of the very points to consider is the team that will manage this role. While many companies have a dedicated health and safety department that works to ensure the management of the company’s member health and safety, others do not.

The most important thing is to have a team that will carry out this function. As such you can appoint one or more designated health and safety officers which could be an existing employee from the company. This should be sufficient if your company is small with minimal health and safety risks. However, if your company is a large-sized one with high-risk business operations, then you would need a highly trained health and safety management team. They should be full-time staff who are highly skilled and experienced in the field.

2. Formulate a health and safety policy

Apart from having a team for the company’s health and safety needs, it is important that you form the company policies. This should be a written policy that should be understood by everyone within the company. Having a health and safety policy for your company would help keep everyone in check and prevent potential risks. Once the policy is prepared, it should be distributed to all employees so they can be made aware of what’s expected of them. Creating a company policy doesn’t have to be complicated as you can have them listed out in a short document with clear, simple and understandable language.

3. Do a Risk Assessment

This is an essential aspect of your company's health and safety management procedure and must be done carefully and thoroughly. Risk assessment involves the processes of ascertaining or identifying the potential risks or hazards so that control measures can be taken. Once a company has been able to identify the risk, implementation to mitigate the risk would be planned and made available in accordance with the existing legislation.

It is therefore important for any company to go through a risk assessment process so it can evaluate the type of health and safety measures that are required. As such, 3 basic actions must be taken to successfully complete the risk assessment procedure.

1. Identify any potential risk or hazard: In carrying out a risk assessment, you need to first identify the potential risk or hazard that could occur within the company. With this, you need to regurgitate about the operation, activities, machine or equipment etc. that could cause harm or injury to individuals within the company including the employees and customers.

You could check the labelled instructions on every machine, equipment or chemical to see if there are specific precautionary cautions. You would also want to ascertain the risk involved in carrying out certain business operations or processes. Once you are able to identify the potential risk, you should note down the category of people that could be affected by such risk, how the risk event could occur and the intensity in which they could occur. All of these would help ensure that the risk events or situation is adequately identified so that control measures can be taken accordingly.

2. Ascertain how to mitigate against potential risk: Once you’ve identified those risks, your company must do all it can to provide control measures against them. As such, you would need to devote effort, finance and the utmost attention to providing measures that would protect the health and safety of every individual within the company.

Also at this stage, you would need to make reference to all the risks identified in the first instance as the health and safety measures to be provided must be done to avoid those risks to the barest. Although a company is legally bound to fulfil effective health and safety management control, it can’t be held liable for a risk that occurred as a result of an unforeseen circumstance. It is thus essential that you involve the health and safety management team during the risk assessment process so they can adequately ascertain the potential risks that you might not be aware of.

3. Document and record the findings and control measures: Proper documentation and recording should be done after identifying the risks and indicating the measures to control them. This should include the risk identified, those individuals that could potentially be affected, materials, substances or equipment that could cause the hazards, the various precautionary measures and so on. Importantly, your company must do a risk assessment regularly as the company continues to evolve. This is to ensure that control measures are provided if new risks surface.

3. Provide Training to Employees

Apart from assessing the risk assessment and providing precautionary measures, it is important that you regularly train your employees in health and safety management practices. They must be aware of the potential hazards that could occur within the company and how they could prevent them. Aside from that, your company must provide the appropriate level of training bearing in mind all the potential risks and hazards identified. Either the training is provided within the company or external personnel are invited to give the training, it is the sole responsibility of the company to cover all the costs associated with it.

4. Be Insured

As a company owner, you are expected to get employer liability insurance once you have employees working for your business. This is to ensure that you are protected when an employee gets sick or sustains an injury as a result of working for your company. Although some businesses might not need this type of insurance, especially if you don’t have an employee yet, however, it’s best to have it always at hand.

If an employee gets injured while working for your company, they can request compensation. However, if you had provided effective health and safety management practices, you might not be legally required to pay this. Although, most companies pay this compensation to their workers willingly.

On the other hand, if your business has a good number of employees and you don’t obtain employer liability insurance, you can be fined for that.

Why Health and Safety Management is Important in a Workplace

Health and safety management in a workplace is important for a lot of reasons. Here are some of them.

1. Health and Safety Improvement

With effective health and safety management procedures put in place, employees would be able to understand what to avoid to reduce risk within the company. They’d know what health and safety management entails and how they can properly protect themselves against risk within the company. Accidents, injuries, and illness will be reduced to the barest minimum as a result of the training, procedures and health equipment that are provided to mitigate against hazards.  Consequently, everyone's health, safety and well-being will be maintained.

2. Enhancing employee's efficiency and morale

Employees within a company are mostly likely to be productive if they are healthy and fine. Health and safety management practices are there to help maintain the health of the workers so they can work efficiently for the company. If employees are prevented from getting sick and injured, they are indirectly saved from receiving treatments from the hospital regularly. As such absenteeism within the company will be greatly reduced.

If, on the other hand, a company fails to provide effective health and safety management control, employees may fall sick or get injured easily. This will in turn reduce the efficiency of the workers and the company as a whole as output or production will be affected.

3. Reduces cost due to illness or injury

Setting up health and safety management, especially for large companies might be costly. However, if these control measures are not put in place, it could even be more expensive to face the consequences. Preventive measures help reduce accidents and illness as much as possible. On the other hand, if these precautionary measures are not taken, the company will have to spend a lot if a hazard occurs.

The cost of taking care of employees affected by the accident, compensation that will be provided to them, cost of employing temporary employees and many more are some of the expenses the company would have to take if the control measures are not put in place. In fact, this could reduce other employee’s morale as they might become concerned about their health and safety

4. Improving company credibility and positive image

A company that takes its health and management practices seriously and does it effectively, is indirectly building a good reputation for itself. As such it will be quite easy for the company to gain more talent into the company. Clients and suppliers will be willing to work with the company and so on. As long as people know that their health and safety are being protected by the company, they will be willing to have a deal with the company.

On the other hand, if a company is known for its unwillingness to protect the health and safety of people, the company could lose its credibility and image.

5. Compliance with health and safety regulations

When you provide the necessary control measures within your company that means you are complying with the requirements of the health and safety regulations. And as such, you are preventing your company from facing any penalty.

6. Increases the chances of getting finance

As a company, you might need to get finance from banks and other investors at one point or the other. This might not be easy to come by but with some management strategies at hand, you could easily get it. One of the ways to show your investors that your company is well managed is the health and safety management practices put in place. Having this will prove to the investors that the company is well organized and managed. Apart from that they would be able to see that employees are encouraged to work effectively to drive meaningful results for the company.

7. Reduces insurance premium cost

Getting insurance premiums for the company is important. However, with effective health and safety management control, your company might be eligible to get them at a lower cost. Once you can provide proof that you are effectively providing measures to mitigate against risk and hazards within the company, the insurer will be willing to offer you lower-cost premiums.

Employee's Responsibilities in Health and Safety Management

As an employee within a company, you are faced with some responsibilities when it comes to health and safety management.

1. You are expected to comply with the rules and regulations of the health and safety authority. You should be aware of the policies guiding the company when it comes to the health and safety of the people
2. It is your duty to cooperate with the health and safety team within the company. All training provided must be attended, and every course or material put in place must also be understood.
3. Also, you are expected to report any issue that could cause danger. If you feel any equipment, substance or machine could pose a danger to the company in the future, it is your responsibility to report to the health and safety team.
4. You must also do everything possible to avoid putting other people within the company in danger. So, you shouldn’t only be protecting yourself but also putting others into consideration when it comes to health and safety.

Conclusion

Providing adequate health and safety management procedures is paramount as a business owner. While it could somehow seem expensive or daunting to set up most of the preventive measures, providing them could save the company from a lot of stress and even more expenses. Moreover, employees within the company need to be kept safe and healthy for them to remain fit for their roles. If you have any questions about managing health and safety at the workplace, don’t hesitate to contact us here, and we’ll do everything we can to help.