Are we compliant?
How do I know we are compliant?
These are common questions from small to medium businesses on the matter of H&S compliance.
Whilst one off questions are easy to address, to answer this question on the business as a whole requires the conduct a health and safety audit and inspections to ensure H&S compliance for a SME. This requires a health and safety management system and a tool such as the Winsland H&S APP, to track what needs to be done / checked and when.
One off audits will give you a snapshot in time. Regular audits (3 or 6 monthly) serve as a “pulse check” to confirm things are operating as intended.
Audits can be full scale formal audits normally conducted with outside specialists. Or they could and should be self-inspections or could even be simple floor walks targeting specific aspects of the operation.
Organisations like ours provide auditing – see our audit services here – LINK
For inspections there are two elements which to some extent may overlap – the inspection needs to cover both:
Firstly controls: run off a list of controls from your risk register and methodically check if they are in place or not. If you don’t have a risk register, you need one and we can assist – see how we can help develop one or build your own using our risk register template
Secondly regulatory: most business are subject to some form of H&S regulation (it may not be labelled H&S) with acts such occupancy of a building, generating noise or dust or use of a chemical creating a compliance need.
For floor walks target specific aspects of the operation: Examples are;
- PPE
- Chemicals
- Fire and emergency systems / equipment
- Machine guarding
- Traffic Management
- Workforce engagement
- Workplace facilities
- Contractor management