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Understanding Health and Safety Management Systems
It’s all very well deciding to make health and safety a priority in your company but these good intentions can fall apart if you try to rush the process or fail to do it professionally. You should follow the guidance provided by a health and safety management system and these are produced by both the British Standards Institution and the International Organization for Standardization. Following one of these systems will mean that you can rest assured in the knowledge that every important element of health and safety has been covered and you will also save time otherwise wasted drawing up a potentially sub-standard plan. Although they do not provide you with step-by-step guides as to what to do, they give you enough information to ensure that you can introduce a personalised system for your company.
By following a health and safety management system, you will be able to learn about the legal requirements affecting your company, which will in turn allow you to draw up your own policy which has been tailored to the needs of your employees and customers. It will also provide you with advice about how to make your policy a reality and will teach you how to create specific procedures which ensure that each legal requirement is met adequately.
Checking that your health and safety regulations are being obeyed is obviously essential and a health and safety management system will explain how to set and check the status of individual targets. It is obviously important that these targets are realistic and that it is obvious how to achieve them. Make them specific, e.g. aiming to reduce the amount of accidents occurring in a specific location on your premises by 60% over the course of a single year.
The health and safety policy that you create must be put in writing if there are more than five employees working on your premises. It will need to include subjects; such as deciding who in your company is responsible for what, arranging regular staff training, implementing safety procedures, and making it clear how dangerous chemicals should be dealt with on a daily basis.
To put it in context, creating a good health and safety policy is as important as creating the perfect business plan for small company owners or constructing a good rescue plan for owners of failing businesses.