Health and safety in the workplace is an increasingly pressing concern, not just for ethical reasons, but for cold-blooded financial ones. According to the Health and Safety Executive, the cumulative cost of workplace injury and ill health was around £16 billion in 2018/19. Of this figure, a significant amount was deducted from the employees themselves – though the taxpayer and the employer each share a sizeable chunk of the burden, too.
Getting health and safety right is, therefore, a matter of serious financial consequence. But putting the right policy in place isn’t a one-off task; it’s something that should be regularly returned to. Let’s take a look at this process of review, and how often it should take place.
Annual Review
A regular review will ensure that all policies and procedures are fit for purpose and up to date. It should be considered a bare minimum. In some organisations, more frequent reviews are warranted. These might include environments that are potentially more dangerous, and where work takes place in seasonal batches.
After an Incident
In the aftermath of an incident, there’s no point in waiting for a scheduled review. It should be clear that something has gone wrong, and effort should be immediately taken to work out what it is and how it can be prevented from going wrong again. If someone has recently slipped and fallen, you might evaluate the work environment in which this happened. This may lead to new measures and policies, such as insisting that everyone wears appropriate safety footwear.
New Hazards Identified
When the working environment changes or a new potential hazard is identified, a new health and safety policy should be devised which accounts for it. For example, a high-profile disaster, or a change in the law, might mean that you become aware of a vulnerability of which you were previously ignorant.
Who should be Involved?
Reviewing and writing a health and safety policy requires input from a range of stakeholders. You want policies that make sense to the people who’ll be implementing them on a day-to-day basis. When policies come from top-down, they risk being resisted.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to involve frontline workers in the formulation of health and safety policy, as well as more specialised people whose job is to analyse risk. In some cases, it might even be appropriate to bring in a third party, who’ll be able to provide an outside perspective that isn’t distorted by the internal politics of your business.
Workplace injuries can be avoided. Health and safety culture is a positive and progressive way of identifying risk and avoiding financial, legal, and personal trouble.
HR Future Staff Writer
