You wouldn’t set and forget a business plan – so why do businesses set and forget safety strategies?
I’m a business owner and a safety auditor – but one plan is revisited a lot more than the other. Why is that? There are financial and criminal risks if we don’t look after our team. However, because we do payroll, think about our pipeline, and plan our work more regularly, the other plan is pulled out less regularly (to be fair, we tend to work from SOPs and other worksite rules).
As with all other businesses, it is our people that are our most important asset and as I was looking through our own safety system over the holiday break, I started to think that we needed to get comfortable with the idea of auditing against our own plan:
- Are we on track?
- Have we got the tools we need?
- Have we addressed the issued raised by our representatives on the work site (example – spare hi-vis for clients workers that turned up to a worksite without any)?
Damien and I took some time to revisit and test our plan, even to the point of laying all our safety clothing, shoes and other equipment out to make sure that everything fitted and we had enough – both for our worksite reps and the situations that we’ve been putting them in.
I was pleased to say we’d kept on top of things over the past year and both feel we’re putting our best foot forward for 2024.
An audit should not be scary. It should be a task that ends with peace of mind.
Are you running monthly or quarterly audits for your team? Let us know if we can help train your team to self-audit, or if you want us to provide an external audit for you.
