How to create a business health and safety procedure

Sep 29

Want to create a business health and safety procedure, but don’t know where to start? Looking for inspiration from real-life UK companies’ health and safety procedures? You’ve come to the right place. Spare yourself the hassle and create a perfect example of a business health and safety procedure today, with this handy guide.

Creating a business health and safety procedure shows your commitment to your staff, suppliers, customers and their wellbeing. After all, these procedures are not just required by law, but can have a meaningful, real-life impact. There’s a reason why health and safety policies are plastered on the walls of offices and worksites, and it’s not just for decoration. By creating a health and safety procedure, a business doesn't just follow all necessary legal requirements; it builds trust and shows responsibility.

That said, creating a health and safety procedure for your business can be a challenge. The good news is that we’re here to help. To that goal, we’ve put together an easy-to-follow manual, designed to save you time and avoid stress. In it, we will provide you with step-by-step instructions to ensure your new policy document is an example of a health and safety procedure other companies look up to.

But, wait, there’s more. To top things off, we’ve even included some handy health and safety procedure examples from UK companies!

What is a health and safety procedure?

Before we figure out how to create a health and safety procedure, it’s worth establishing what it actually is and what it’s for.

In brief, health and safety procedures outline the way you intend to manage all kinds of hazards in your business. It’s a plan of what the procedures are and who’s responsible for executing them.

The goal of a health and safety procedure is to keep everyone involved in your business operations - your staff, customers, and suppliers - informed and reassured, and to prepare your business for whatever hazards could crop up.

How to create a health and safety procedure for your business

A one-size-fits-all model for a health and safety policy simply doesn’t exist. Its shape, size, and depth will largely depend on the size and type of business. That said, following the path presented below will allow you to create a good example of a health and safety procedure - then you can just customise it to your specific needs.

Step 1. Identify Notable Hazards

At its heart, any health and safety policy has one critical goal: to prevent and mitigate hazards.

Hazards - that is, sources of potential harm to workers, customers and other persons - come in all shapes and forms, depending on the type of business that your company specializes in. To make the identification of hazards easier, we have divided them into the following categories:

Chemical hazards: risks associated with chemicals harmful to humans.
Physical hazards: elements of the environment posing potential risk to humans, such as air quality, slippery surfaces, noise, heat etc.
Biological hazards: natural hazards such as bacteria, viruses, animals and plants.
Ergonomic hazards: risks resulting from work-related activities such as lifting of heavy objects, sitting position, repetitive movements etc.
Psychological hazards: risks associated with mental wellbeing, including work-related stress, harassment, workload etc.

These general categories can be then further specified, to include other examples of health and safety hazards, such as fire hazards, electrical hazards and so on.

Your task is to identify all hazards present in your business, in order to minimize the risk they pose and their effects. Any comprehensive business health and safety procedure will be backed up by a thorough and honest assessment. After all, an identified and known hazard is less likely to surprise and endanger anyone.

Step 2: Collect Relevant Safety Data

Once you identify all the potential hazards present in your workplace, you can proceed to collecting all relevant safety data, records of previous incidents, records of health and safety training and other relevant information.

There are a number of data collection methods that can be used, simultaneously:

Audits and inspections: performed regularly, they can give you valuable insight into your business’ health and safety procedures, achievements and shortcomings over a period of time.

Staff and customer surveys: Used alongside audits, these provide further information, as well as a picture of your staff’s and customers’ outlook on your health and safety efforts.
Ongoing reporting: up-to-date records of any incidents, health and safety training, new hazards and other, will help you build a more precise picture.

There’s also another less formal, but equally important way to collect health and safety data: listening.

Maintaining a culture of honesty and respect within your company will encourage your staff to share their observations, opinions, and suggestions. Their hands-on experience and intimate knowledge of the most obscure intricacies of your business operations can provide you with valuable insight, help you identify any potential health and safety hazards, and put you in a prime position to avoid them.

Step 3: Record the Safety Procedures

Armed with all the data collected in the first two steps, you can now proceed to create and record your health and safety procedure. The information that you collected will give you a clear picture of the issues you have to address and measures you need to take to provide your staff, associates, and customers with a safe environment for work and business.

A great example of a health and safety procedure should contain the following:

The aim of the policy

Your commitment to providing a healthy and safe environment for work and business dealings. This may include the following:

Safe equipment
Safe work environments
Safe facilities, such as restrooms, kitchens etc.
Health and safety monitoring procedures
Health and safety training
Easily accessible safety equipment

Health and safety standards you expect your staff to follow.
A list of procedures and measures aimed at mitigating any health and safety hazards within your business.
Persons responsible for specific areas of your business’s health and safety procedures.
Health and safety regulations with which your business is expected to comply.

Once the document is ready and signed by the company’s top management, it’s time to publish it. It should be placed in a clearly visible, easily accessible area, for anyone to read. In addition, it can also be published on your website, presented alongside other documents to all new employees, and discussed during training sessions.

Step 4: Put the Procedures into Practice

We’ve already established that your new health and safety procedure isn’t there just for decoration, it’s meant to prevent and mitigate real-life hazardous situations within your business. Once you put all the hard work into creating your perfect example of a health and safety procedure, it’s time to put it into practice.

Hopefully, you won't need to exercise your policy in a real-life hazardous situation. But that doesn’t mean you should just hang it on the wall and forget about it. Remember, prevention is better than cure, and the best way to prevent accidents from causing serious damage, is training. Your new policy will provide you with a health and safety training script for your staff. During training sessions, your employees can get familiar with the contents of your policy and learn the right course of action, so if an accident does happen, they will be prepared.

Step 5: Analyse the Effectiveness of the Procedures

Your business health and safety procedure is never truly finished. Health and safety is a matter of constant data collection, feedback loops and making necessary adjustments.

Businesses are dynamic - and with changes come new challenges, which is why it’s important to continually analyse the effectiveness of your policy, respond to new circumstances and make necessary improvements.

This brings us back to steps 1 and 2 - identifying hazards and collecting safety data. By doing so, you will not only evaluate the effectiveness of your health and safety policy, but keep it relevant and up-to-date.

Creating a business health and safety procedure poses some challenges, but it certainly is worthwhile. At the very least, it will give you some much-needed peace of mind, while potentially saving the health and lives of the most important asset of any business - its people.

UK health and safety procedure examples:

Before you begin working on your own business health and safety policy, take a look at the following health and safety procedures examples from the UK for inspiration:

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