Advanced Recruitment

Working smarter and working safely

Working Smarter equates to Working More Safely!

Knowing what represents Workplace Health and Safety is the easy part, however, it can be much more difficult to implement strategies and monitor the safe practices in your workplace. If you are a larger business you may be lucky enough to have an entire department dedicated to implementing and monitoring programs , maintaining compliant standards and training staff where necessary. If you are a smaller business then the situation is likely to very different, perhaps someone is dedicating a couple of hours a week to WH&S, this is frightening as the impact of unmanaged or deliquent WH&S can be as dramatic for the smaller organisation as it is for the larger ones. It is not only the financial impact but also the responsiblity for the well being of employees and/or co- workers is a very important moral issue.

Well planned and managed Work Place Health and Safety programs can enhance our position in the industry sector and most definitely attract business, large organisations are more likely to do business with companies who display compliant and proactive WH&S policies and proceedures. Reliable, loyal and well training staff are also attracted to organisation's who offer visable WH&S policies and proceedures.

How well are you managing your Workplace Health and Safety?

Is your time so limited that a serious incident has to occur before resources are dedicated to fixing an issue? What can you do to be more proactive?

Step one;

Start with a workplace inspection. This will result in a master list of all the hazards in your workplace, then assess the risk of all those hazards on your list, prioritise what needs to be done, form high risk to low risk. This process will transform your original 'to do list' into an appropriate Risk Management Format.

If you require assistance with this process please don't hesitate to contact us.

The OH&S "to do list"

• train supervisors and leading hands in implementing risk management activies
• review policies and proceedures in relation to OH&S
• appoint a 'responsible person' or in case of larger organisations a "committee"
• conduct monthly workplace inspections
• update safe work practices
• ensure all machinery users are compentency address (addressing any special learning requirements e.g.LL&N)
• conduct regular toolbox talks
• manual handling training
• review hazards reported in the last 6 months
• look at trends for reported incidents

It is important to remember we should not just go through the process, the term 'look at' for example should not be taken literally, when looking at incident reports we are looking for the common denominator (the hazard).