Working together to support all workers
Regardless of the size of your organisation, having an effective SMS can be one of the best ways to ensure you have a safety focused business and are complying with your safety duty obligations.
This guide shows you each stage of an important function or element of an effective SMS. The eight stages that form the SMS roadmap are:
An SMS is a systematic approach to managing safety, including the necessary organisational structures, accountabilities, policies, and procedures. It should aim to manage safety risks and ensure the safety of your organisation’s activities, so far as is reasonably practicable. When you put your own SMS into practice, it should become integrated into your business. It should reflect the way work is carried out and influence every activity of your business, as well as everyone in it.
We’ve also created a self-audit checklist to help you identify which SMS elements you already have in place.
The heart of every good SMS is an effective approach to managing safety risks. This includes being able to identify those risks, consider how they could impact your organisation, what risk controls are in place, if further treatments are required, and monitoring to ensure all is working as designed.
Common risk management tools such as risk assessments and risk registers are used in all types of organisations around the world, as the cornerstone of their SMS. Embracing their development, implementation and regular review is critical for your SMS journey.
A hazard and incident reporting process is integral to an effective SMS. Put simply, it helps identify where things could go or have gone wrong and a concerning safety issue has or may arise. The reporting and subsequent identification of safety hazards and incidents in your organisation helps continually inform a range of other vital SMS components. These include risk assessments and risk registers, incident investigations, and continuous improvement. Most importantly, it is the initial timely process that helps determine steps to prevent safety incidents reoccurring.
A visible and demonstrated commitment to safety by your management always underpins an effective SMS and positive safety culture. It illustrates to all staff, customers and third parties how seriously safety is taken by your organisation and should be reflected in the way the organisation operates on a day-to-day basis.
All functions of your SMS, including key risk controls, should be documented to help lock in and reinforce critical safety processes, to educate and train staff, formally record incidents and other safety information, assist top management in meeting their due diligence requirements, and should it be required, help demonstrate that you are effectively managing your safety risks, so far as is reasonably practicable.
Once an organisation has a working incident reporting process in place, the next logical step for your SMS is enabling you to investigate safety incidents.
Investigating reported incidents helps establish how and why it occurred. This helps reduce the likelihood of similar events recurring by identifying the causes and contributing factors and exploring opportunities for safety improvements.
Almost every organisation in some way provides education, advice, or training to staff to help ensure they remain safe at work, and don’t contribute to causing some form of safety incident. Having a greater and more planned focus on the critical safety training requirements in your organisation will further strengthen and complement the controls in place to reduce the impact of your safety risks.
Planned and structured communications to staff about your organisation’s SMS, its key components, and the safety role of management and staff will result in greater workplace engagement and system effectiveness.
Targeted and scheduled safety training and communication are important practices that can assist you in developing and supporting a positive safety culture and sustaining safety in the business.
Safety performance monitoring helps to measure the quality of the practices in your organisation to meet any established safety objectives.
Establishing safety objectives can help to:
Continuous improvement and change management These are important ongoing processes that can assist in managing current and emerging safety risks in the organisation. It is often considered the difference between managing safety and leading safety.
If you want to identify which SMS elements you already have in place, download our eight stage roadmap Safety Management System (SMS) Checklist by filling the form in this page.
And remember, for everyone’s safety, work safely.
