As health and safety professionals, we are often met with common frustrations from our clients.
People simply find safety confusing and complicated. They don’t want to decode the safety legislation. They just want to know what to do and what not to do so that they comply with the rules and protect their staff from injury and harm. They want peace of mind.
So, as a team – and over Friday pizza – we were chatting about how we can support businesses address this frustration. Bloated, we came up with a neat and concise set of 3 Cs – what we like to call The 3 C’s of Effective Health and Safety Management.
Even if you’re a novice and have never previously implemented a health and safety procedure, you’ll find that if you follow these simple 3 C’s you will be well on your way to success:
1. Communication
Unquestionably the key to making safety work in the workplace is to keep talking about it with your team and within your teams.
While the legislation documentation is long and complex, it actually really only stresses one point – that you talk or ‘work together to continuously improve safety’.
For legal purposes, this can be as simple as starting to ask your colleagues and staff “How are you doing in your job today?” The answer to this question may be the key to finding those hazards in the workplace getting in the way of your staff being healthy, safe and productive.
2. Common sense
Actually, safety often isn’t as hard or complicated as many businesses think. It just seems that way sometimes.
But when it comes down to it, it’s just about you and your staff asking yourselves “Do I feel safe doing this?” or “Would I do this myself?” If the answer is ‘no’ then that’s a pretty good indication that you need to mitigate the risk around that hazard and put some safer practices in place.
And yes, we know that common sense is not always that common; but sometimes all it takes is the opportunity to bring common sense to mind. Try asking your workers on a weekly basis if they saw anything they didn’t feel too good about and go from there.
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3. Connection
And finally, we come to connection. It can be a good idea for all businesses – big or small – to connect with others from time to time.
This maybe your peers, the health and safety regulator or OHS consultants. Connect with others to get general advice, or connect with others simply to sense check that what you are doing is on the right track.
So try connecting with your regulator via their news feeds – see this list of the state regulators and their contact details. Or join one of the many free webinars and seminars on safety relevant to your industry.
And for Victorian small businesses – try WorkSafe Victoria’s OHS Essentials program for a free OHS health check!
So, there you have it – our 3 C’s of effective health and safety management. And we might even be a little cheeky and add a 4th one to the list – which is of course ‘the Champion’!
For a product tour to see how our software can help you implement your health and safety management system, contact us today!
To see practical advice for getting safety moving in your organisation, check out our Keen to get safety sorted in 2019? blog.
