Managing risks is crucial to safeguard both your employees and your business, and adhere to legal requirements. It helps you concentrate on the significant risks in your workplace that could cause genuine harm. Often, simple actions can effectively manage these risks, like promptly cleaning spills to prevent slips or keeping cupboard drawers closed to avoid tripping. These uncomplicated measures are usually affordable and highly effective, ensuring the safety of your most valuable asset—your workforce.
The law doesn't expect you to eliminate all risk, but it does require you to reasonably protect people. This guide will assist you to evaluate and handle health and safety risks in your workplace.
Using four simple steps, this guide will help you create a clear path for conducting Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) risk management.
It’s a great starting point for your organisation. We find this method to be a simple and effective for most purposes, but different methods may suit more complex risks and situations.
Managing risks involves three main steps: figuring out the risks, evaluating them, and finding ways to control them. When we start by finding all possible risks related to an activity or process, we call it hazard identification. Then we evaluate the risks and work on controlling them.
This step involves carefully examining your work area and tasks to spot any potential dangers that come with the job. Work areas can range from machine workshops, labs, offices, and more, while tasks can include using various equipment, handling hazardous substances, dealing with people, driving, and emergency situations.
Here's how you can effectively identify hazards:
Examples of hazards:
Remember, hazard identification is an ongoing process and should happen when your employees start a new job, you make workplace changes, or after incidents or accidents. This process helps reveal overlooked hazards, detect new ones, address ergonomic issues, consider environmental factors, ensure ongoing safety standards, and highlight training needs.
In this step, we identify risks associated with potential hazards for health and safety, for instance:
To perform a comprehensive risk assessment, we consider two essential factors:
Using a simple risk matrix that combines likelihood and impact, we categorise risks into:
Addressing risks promptly is crucial, especially for those deemed critical or high. To effectively manage risks, prioritise actions based on their effectiveness. Here's the hierarchy of risk control measures:
Remember to develop work procedures for new control measures, clearly defining responsibilities for management, supervisors, and workers.
To implement improvements effectively:
Keep everyone informed about the implemented control measures and the reasons behind the changes. Supervision is key to ensure their proper implementation and usage. Maintenance is crucial for ongoing effectiveness—document maintenance requirements and verify their implementation in work procedures.
Whenever you're dealing with a hazard, it's crucial to evaluate how you're controlling it and this should consider how it affects the equipment, substances, systems, or environment in use. The goal is to ensure that the control measures don't worsen the existing hazard or introduce a new one. Everyone involved should be informed about any changes and provided with the necessary information, training, and supervision to keep them safe. It's also a good idea to have periodic reviews by the area supervisor to check if the control measures are still effective and suitable.
Remember, identifying and managing hazards is an ongoing process. Whenever there's a change in the workplace—whether the work setup, tools, machinery, or processes—it's essential to revisit the hazard identification, risk assessment, and control procedures to ensure they're up to date and effective.
And remember, for everyone’s safety, work safely.
Anna leads our Work, Health and Safety (WHS) team which forms part of our broader Workplace Risk Practice. Her team assist clients in understanding their ongoing obligations under WHS legislation and partner with them to implement the right risk prevention strategies for their workplace.
