There should be no doubt that one of the central responsibilities that you have as an employer is to ensure that your health and safety policy is without any holes. This means that there are no potential failures that could end up causing additional issues further down the line. Taking this firmly into account, when you know about the major mistakes out there, you also help to ensure that you are best placed to avoid them getting repeated time and time again. So, let’s check out all the health and safety failures that you certainly need to be sidestepping as a point of priority.
Not Identifying the Hazards in the First Place
The initial failure that you should certainly be avoiding is not identifying the potential hazards that are there in the first place. Ultimately, the best course of action that you can take to avoid this happening is to have a full assessment of the risks that exist out there. It is certainly going to be worth having a proper review regularly, as these threats and dangers are always going to be evolving and changing over time. One threat that is always going to be there that needs to be dealt with clearly is the fire safety risk assessment. The more thorough that you are going to be about this, the better it is likely to be for you.
Failing to Learn from Near Misses
Even if you have a fantastically clear health and safety policy in place, it is also bound to be the case that there is always the potential for near misses to occur. While these may not always be avoidable, what you can do is learn why they happened. This is not from the point of view of establishing blame (unless there have been some very clear mistakes that have been made) but, instead, to determine some of the individual circumstances that were in place that you could and should be sidestepping.
Not Having Regular Training Sessions
In a big way, this certainly fits in with the previous two points that have already been made earlier in the blog post. Training is always going to be one of the best ways of ensuring that the issues that have occurred in the past are not going to keep on cropping up time and time again. At the same time, the training should be based on the individual risks that have been identified along the way. As well as this, it should consider the near misses that have occurred during your time running the company. Also, it should not be simply assumed that training is going to be refreshed without any effort. Instead, you need to be making a special effort to keep on scheduling it as a point of priority.
Failing to Display Clear Signage
Several different elements can help to prevent any issues from occurring in the first place. There is no doubt that clear signage should be considered a defender against any hazards and prevent them from occurring in the first place. The most obvious place where the signage should be present is around the particularly high-risk areas. At the same time, you also need to make sure that you have proper imagery and that you have made allowances for staff members who may not speak English as a first language and those that have different accessibility requirements.
Not Setting the Right Example
There is no doubt that a clear health and safety policy should come down from the top. Otherwise, staff members are simply not going to treat what you are doing with the level of seriousness that is required of it. Ultimately, you need to be practicing what you are preaching. If not, you are going to find it seriously difficult for you to get the message across that all these things matter.
Failing to Review Policy
As has already been touched upon earlier on in the blog post, there is certainly no doubt that your policy needs to be looked at and reviewed regularly. Otherwise, there is going to be every chance that it is not keeping up with the changing threats that exist out there and you could well be missing out on something that would have been picked up on with a proper review process conducted. You may think that most of these issues will never occur, but it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to health and safety in the workplace.