Keeping the people in your business safe and sound is one of the primary responsibilities you have as an employer. And if you are keen to do this right, you’ll need to think about how you are going to make a success of it. One of the main things to prepare for here is the safety audit – whether your own self-audit or an external one. There are quite a few things you’ll need to do to prepare for such an audit, so let’s look at some of the final checks to make in particular.
Risk Assessments
This is one of the main things that most safety audits are going to check. In other words, have you carried out all the relevant risk assessments, and have they been done properly and thoroughly? You need to do a risk assessment for each main task that takes place in your organization, and then you need to publicly display the findings as well as put any issues into action as soon as possible. So make sure you have done this, before you have a safety audit in particular.
PPE
You also need to provide your people with all the necessary PPE and other safety supplies they might need. Whatever it is that an employee needs to do their job, you should make sure to provide it to them. Part of this is about listening to them when they tell you that they are missing something vital, and part of it is about making sure that they are going to have all the really basic items on hand as and when they need them. So make sure that you are getting this right from the first.
Machinery & Equipment
All equipment and machinery in use needs to be in good working condition, and in particular it needs to be safe to operate it. To that end, you need to make sure that you are looking at each and every machine and piece of equipment in turn, and fixing any that are not working. If there are any that are dangerous to use, or which seem to be, make sure to remove them in the first instance until they are fixed up. Certainly you should be providing your employees with equipment which they can trust and which is not going to cause them harm when they use it.
Training Trackers
There are all kinds of training that you need to have carried out with your employees, to ensure that they know what they are doing with regards to safety in the workplace. So you need to keep up with this training, and in particular you need to make sure that you have tracked what training you have done, especially that which is a legal requirement to do. You need to be able to show this paperwork when it is asked for in an audit, so make sure to check this beforehand so you don’t get caught out – and train up anyone who needs it.