Are you ready for a workplace inspection?
WorkSafe inspectors have legislated powers to enter your workplace during working hours, or when there is an immediate risk to anyone, to assess compliance with health and safety laws.
When they enter your workplace, WorkSafe will notify the person in charge as well as any health and safety representatives of their presence. They inspect businesses of all sizes across all industries. This means that any day now your workplace could be visited.
Do you have regular scheduled meetings to discuss health and safety? It’s a legal requirement that safety is discussed in workplaces, and you gain great insights into safety issues and solutions from your workers so start by talking. These questions will help you identity some simple things you can do to improve safety.
- Do you have a Safety Action Plan?
- Do you have a register of injuries? It’s legally required that you keep one.
- Do you have a list of possible hazards?
- Which hazards have the greatest potential to cause injury or disease or are a risk to public safety? You should mark these as your high priority hazards and rank them in priority order from highest to lowest.
When you’ve prioritised the hazards on your list, the next stage is to identify the resources and impact on the organisation and identify how to improve safety. You’ll often find there are simple solutions to many of the hazards in your workplace. Most of them will be inexpensive and some will cost nothing at all. Of course, sometimes there are no straightforward solutions. What do you do then?
A dedicated safety professional can guide you through more complex issues, for example what you need to do if your workers have a work-related injury or illness and supporting your injured worker return to work, while meeting your legal obligations as an employer.
Want to get started with safety now? Contact us for an informal discussion.