Risk assessment is what good health & safety is all about

It Doesn’t matter what level you work at in a business; you should stay involved in a risk assessment process…

But what does a good one look like?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Who is involved; If they are written by management in an office then you are missing out on a fantastic opportunity to do it better. Go out, speak to the supervisors and employees and find out who and how much they are involved in the process! How comfortable are they with the processes? Do they feel the controls in place are effective? Is there anything we can do to improve them? Spend some time involving other members of your staff in the risk assessment process and things are going to improve for you

Get rid of annual review mentality; If you do all your risk assessments in a day, you will give yourself mental fatigue. Spread the load and build in a review of your risk assessment as a regular practice every single week; before jobs are going to happen to see how you will control the risks.

Split your site into sections; Which one of these jobs relate to which section? Set challenges over the jobs to improve and build on controls in place.

Have a look at your risk assessment process; specifically the further controls column. Colin judges how active a business is by the activity in this column. What Colin wants to see is a column that is not Empty implies complicity. If you have no further controls in your risk assessment process, then Colin doesn’t think you are looking at it hard enough and urges you to prove it by testing it!

Don’t score it so everything remains in the ‘Green’; if you see a risk assessment where everything is green, then green means ‘Danger’! Colin urges you to question how safe it truly is, if everything is deemed safe.

Challenge how you think about the process;Colin see’s lots of people doing the assessments, but not a lot of people actually ‘assessing’ the risks. Risk assessment is fundementally asking the questions ‘Do we need to do this job?’ and ‘How can we do this job better?’. Colin says you will only achieve this by spending time with the people who do the job; these people who do the job every day, every week and every month are the experts on the job, its process and its safety.

 

ABOUT THE HOST
Colin Nottage
 

‘Making health and safety as important as everything else we do.’

This is the belief that Colin is passionate about and through his consultancy Influential

Management Group (IMG) is able to spread into industry.

Colin works at a strategic level with company owners and board members. He helps business leaders establish and achieve their health and safety ambitions.

He has developed a number of leading competency improvement programmes

That are delivered across industry and his strengths are his ability to take a practical approach to problem-solving and being able to liaise at all levels within an organisation.

Colin also runs a company that vets contractors online and a network that develops and support H&S consultancies to become better businesses.

Colin chairs the Construction Dust Partnership, an industry collaboration directly involving

many organisations, including the Health and Safety Executive.

He is a Post Graduate Tutor at Strathclyde University and a highly sought-after health and safety speaker and trainer.

He has a Post Graduate Certificate in Safety and Risk management, an engineering degree and is a Chartered Member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).