A watchful assessment of what could harm people in your business organization is called risk assessment. Once you assess the risk, you would understand whether you’ve taken enough precautions to prevent the harm or whether you need to take more. Risk assessment is important for the health and safety of an organization and the main objectives of risk assessment is to determine the measures which are needed to comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. Unless you take the required measures to reduce the level of accidents or incidents, you will be at a loss after setting up your company.
Risk Assessment – How should you do it?
Well, although there are no such fized rules as to how you should carry out risk assessment, yet there are few principles which might be followed by a company. There are 5 steps to ensure that the entire risk assessment process is carried out properly. Let’s take a look at the steps.
- Recognizing the hazards: If you wish to identify the hazards, you have to comprehend the difference between a risk and a hazard. Remember that a hazard is something that has the potential to cause harm and risk is the likelihood of the prospective harm to be understood. You can use a number of techniques in order to recognize hazards like walking around the entire office or asking your employees about some such recommendations.
- Make a decision of who may be harmed and in what way: Once you get to know the number of hazards, you have to understand who may be harmed due to those hazards and in what way. Will the respective hazard harm people who are working in the warehouse or will it harm the members of the public or will it harm your clients? Thsi is a vital consideration.
- Evaluate the risk and decide on the measures: Once you know the hazards and who might be harmed due to them, you have to take the needed protection to prevent the people from getting harmed. These hazards can either be removed entirely or the risks can be controlled so that the injury is decreased.
- Record what you find: You should write down whatever you find as this is a legal requirement whenever your company has more than 5 employees. When you record the findings, it shows that you have actually identified the hazards. It also shows that you’re planning to eliminate all risks.
- Review the assessment: Never forget to check whether the hazards are still there or they have been eliminated. Keep reviewing your assessment and accordingly you should also keep updating the filing. It might be professionally be updated and reviewed anytime.
Hence, if you’re someone who has been worried about the risks in your organization, opt for risk assessment by following the steps mentioned above.