When Do You Need a Risk Assessment?
As an employer, you are responsible for the safety and well-being of your staff. You need to ensure that your work environment is safe and that all potential risks have been mitigated in your company’s procedures. You must also make sure that your staff is aware of those procedures and understands their own responsibilities in the workplace.
But circumstances change all the time in most businesses, whether because of staff turnover or new roles being undertaken by the firm. How often, then, should a risk assessment take place? In this article, we are going to discuss that very question.
Official Guidance
According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), “as an employer, you must make a ‘suitable and sufficient assessment’ of risks to your employees’ health and safety and risks to others.” They also state that a risk assessment should be carried out “every time there are new machines, substances, or procedures that could lead to new hazards.” If this sounds a little vague, the official website for the Trades Union Congress has provided additional guidance for its members that any company would do well to consider.
In their advice, they recommend that an employer should carry out a risk assessment under the following circumstances:
Introduction of new hazards
If you are undertaking a new process, adopting a new way of working, or operating new machinery and equipment, it is important that each of these elements be assessed for any risk to your employees. Will your staff require training or suitable certification moving forward in order to complete the new process safely? Do you need to install safeguards to protect your staff in the work environment?
Change of location
Even if the work you do remains the same, if you move to a new location, you are required to perform a risk assessment to ensure that the new premises are safe for your team. While environmental safety checks (including asbestos surveys and fire safety checks) should have been conducted as part of the purchase or rent agreement, you also need to establish evacuation points, routes, and gathering points, look for potential trip hazards, areas that might result in bottlenecks for staff, and so on.
Staff turnover
If you find yourself with a high turnover of staff, you need to establish if there is a health and safety risk associated with that. Are staff quitting through stress? Are there unusually high instances of sick leave? Is there a hostile work environment? All of these things need investigating as part of risk assessment.
Individual risk assessments
Sometimes you need a new risk assessment because of an individual’s changed circumstances rather than a change to your own procedures. This could be because a member of staff has returned from a period of long-term sickness absence, for instance, and needs certain reasonable adjustments put in place. Another common example is when an employee is either pregnant or breastfeeding and the work environment might put them or the baby at risk.
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If you need help performing a risk assessment for your place of work, give Dromore Safety Services Ltd a call today to see how we can help. You can contact us on 07717 210 323 to arrange a free consultation with one of our experts.
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