Workplace Health and Safety Risk Assessment Services
Why Is It Important to Perform a Health and Safety Risk Assessment at Your Workplace?
Performing a health and safety risk assessment at your business can help ensure you have policies and practices in place that promote a safe workplace for both employees and customers.
Workplace risk assessments can help you identify potential safety hazards and make a plan to address them. For businesses located in the US, this is also important for ensuring you are in compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's legal requirements and showing employees you value their safety by being proactive.
Below are the types of risk assessments we offer:
Risk Maturity
Capabilities
Understand your risk profile against industry benchmarks in health and safety. Know how compliant your business is, including across your third parties, and where you may be non-compliant.
Coyle Group’s risk maturity assessment service can help you identify your major risks across three domains and then work with you to take response actions to reduce non-compliance and protect your business.
Services
Risk Maturity
Capabilities
Understand your risk profile against industry benchmarks in ethical labour, health and safety or corporate governance. Know how compliant your business is, including across your third parties, and where you may be non-compliant.
Coyle Group’s risk maturity assessment service can help you identify your major risks across three domains and then work with you to take response actions to reduce non-compliance risk.
Features
Working with you, we will agree the scope for the maturity assessment and then collect compliance data from you through a mixture of document reviews, interviews, and surveys. These will be analysed, and our algorithm will provide a maturity ranking. Our risk maturity model is backed up by academic references and industry benchmarking tools and resources/
You will receive a maturity ranking score and a set of prioritised recommendations for improvement. This provides an easy-to-understand system for executives to get to grips with their health and safety risks and make effective decisions and investments against them.
The assessment may be repeated on a regular basis to check whether actions in improvement areas are successful.
Similarly, if your supply chain or contractor base is regularly changing, it is possible to assess your third-party risk on a frequent basis to ensure ongoing compliance.
Types / Details
There are currently three key types of risk maturity assessment that we offer:
- Ethical Labour
This assessment will look at the ethical labour risks across your third-party landscape, assessing to what extent your contractor base is compliance with ethical labour standards. Typically, this assessment will measure ethical labour risk maturity across four areas:
o Leadership and governance
o Third party risk management
o Procurement
o Payments and processing
- Health and Safety
This assessment examines the extent to which your third parties are compliant with health and safety legislation, considering such questions as how risk-tolerant your contractors are and their maturity in managing risks such as behaviour risk, operation risk, culture risk and third-party risk.
- Corporate Governance
The corporate governance maturity assessment will measure the maturity of your corporate governance mechanisms, processes and relations used to control and operate the organisation and its third-party landscape and the subsequent controls throughout your third party landscape.
What Does a Health and Safety Risk Assessment Include?
A health and safety risk assessment generally includes five main steps:
Identify the Problems
You can't fix what you don't know about, so the first step toward creating a safer workplace is to conduct a thorough assessment that looks for any and all safety risks. OSHA may have some general checklists you can use to identify commonly missed areas, but the potential hazards will be unique to your business, location and any hazardous substances your company regularly uses. Once you have a written list, it can be helpful to ask employees to review it and make any additions that they have encountered. You'll also want to prioritize the list based on the severity and likelihood of the potential risks.
Start Taking Action
Begin with the issues that have the highest level of risk associated with them. These may be workplace hazards that are the most dangerous or that could cause potential injury more often than others. Create a plan for how you will fix the issue, who is responsible, what the satisfaction criteria is and how often you will follow up to ensure the control measures actually worked.
Write Down Your Process
If you have a business that employs five or more people, you are required to have written documentation for your health and safety risk assessment process — and how any issues are mitigated. If you don't already have a documented process for this, the time to start is now. If you already have this paperwork, it's a good idea to ensure it's up-to-date.
Follow Up
Don't just assume the issue was taken care of. Sometimes, potential fixes fail or create new hazards that weren't anticipated. Conducting regular risk assessments or using our consulting services can help across a range of industries and ensure you're able to implement protective measures to keep employees safe.The steps listed above may sound simple, but the process can be time-consuming – especially when you’re already busy running your business – and it’s important to get the job done right. If you’d like the assistance of a workplace safety professional, contact us today.
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RIDDOR and COVID-19
Many employers are concerned about their reporting obligations for COVID-19/Coronavirus/SARS-CoV-2 under RIDDOR in the ongoing pandemic. You may be pleased to know that you do not have to report everything to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). We'll provide more info about when, what, and how to report.
The most common concern we've seen recently from employers is whether they need to report all COVID-19 and coronavirus testing results to the HSE. The short answer is no. According to the HSE: “There is no requirement under RIDDOR (The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013) to report incidents of disease or deaths of members of the public, patients, care home residents or service users from COVID-19. The reporting requirements relating to cases of, or deaths from, COVID-19 under RIDDOR apply only to occupational exposure, that is, as a result of a person's work.”
Generally speaking, the ordinary RIDDOR rules already cover COVID-19. You should only make a report under RIDDOR when one of the following circumstances applies:
• an accident or incident at work has or could have caused the release of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). (Report as Dangerous occurrence)
• a worker is diagnosed with COVID-19 due to occupational exposure. (Report as Disease)
• a worker dies because of occupational coronavirus exposure. (Report as Work-related death due to exposure to a biological agent)
The bottom line is that existing rules cover most COVID-19 measures, and most of the COVID-19 guidance comes from public health authorities rather than the HSE. The environment remains chaotic, but you can minimize your legal exposure by continuing your existing compliance steps. This will include communicating with your insurer about risks, following public health guidance, and communicating regularly with your workers or unions on any of their concerns.
© Gavin Coyle, 2021