The health and safety landscape in New Zealand is designed to ensure the health and safety of businesses, employees, and customers. While this is vital, it can prove tricky or even overwhelming to navigate for businesses that are doing their best to stay compliant.
Smart Safety Solutions was formed to provide companies – big and small – with practical, easy-to-manage health and safety solutions. If you’re responsible for your company’s health and safety compliance and feeling daunted at the prospect of wading through these issues, we’re here to help.
Read on as the Smart Safety Solutions team outlines the best steps to ensure health and safety compliance in New Zealand and reviews how we can help you achieve this.
Create a Customised Safety System
When it comes to health and safety, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your business has unique needs and desired outcomes that will dictate the extent of the safety systems you need to put in place. For example, some businesses just need a place to store files or forms from their staff, while others need comprehensive safety performance assessments to keep their finger on the pulse.
Creating a customised safety system for your business looks like assessing the current state of your systems, building a custom risk profile, and instilling ways to manage those risks that everyone is aware of. It’s a large time investment upfront, but one that will save you thousands of dollars in the long run.
The Smart Safety Solution
We’re all about tailoring safety systems to suit unique businesses. Our focus is keeping it simple, working with you to craft solutions that work based on your business’s unique risk profile. We believe solutions should be effective, affordable, and avoid unnecessary complexity.
Promptly and Thoroughly Investigate Incidents
When the worst happens, it can be stressful for the business and its employees. With all the stress piling up and an unfamiliar situation in front of you, it’s unfortunately all too easy to accidentally err from complaint procedure. Improper incident investigations and subpar reporting can only increase the stress, especially if the incident progresses further.
To that end, it’s extremely important to promptly and thoroughly investigate workplace health and safety incidents. This helps address the immediate issue and finds ways to prevent the same incident from happening in the future.
The Smart Safety Solution
Our highly competent investigation team can guide you through the process, help you write the report, and instill additional safety procedures to prevent the incident from recurring.
In addition, we offer a hands-on approach. Our team can undertake the complex investigation for you, handling the stress and intricacies of the process while giving you the best outcome.
Train Your Staff for Safety
We have a motto: “a trained staff member is an inherently safer staff member”. Having company-specific health and safety training ensures everyone understands the risks and hazards unique to your business. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, providing staff members with the following training is essential to safety at work:
- Dedicated training
- Effective inductions
- Clear literature on risks and hazards
This includes training new staff members when they join, but it also includes consistently training all staff members on updates to the health and safety policies at work.
The Smart Safety Solution
Crafting and providing ongoing health and safety training in-house can be difficult and time-consuming without dedicated resources to call on. This is where Smart Safety Solutions can help.
We consult with you to determine your needs, then plan and run comprehensive training sessions to keep your staff up to date. Thanks to our twenty-five years of experience in the field of health and safety, we can also help identify gaps in your current training.
Carefully Prepare for Audits
Finally, preparing for audits is a big part of health and safety compliance as a business. This falls under your due diligence obligations under the Act, allowing you to see where your systems need improvement.
External audits can happen spontaneously following incidents or as part of a scheduled sweep by the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE). In both cases, it’s important to know how your business will measure up and take steps to resolve issues quickly.
The best way to do this is to conduct regular internal safety audits, identify areas for improvement, and adapt your systems. We recommend using a specific audit framework to guide these audits; otherwise, you might leave yourself open to a compliance failure.
The Smart Safety Solution
We’re experienced at helping businesses check their health and safety systems, both before upcoming scheduled audits or in response to incidents. We can use standard audit templates like the AS/NZ 4801 Health and Safety Standard or the new ISO 45001, or we can create a specific audit to suit your unique circumstances.
Simplify your workplace health and safety obligations.
At Smart Safety Solutions, we make navigating health and safety compliance easy. Unsure where to begin? You’re not alone!
Book a free 1-hour compliance consultation for your workplace with one of our expert health and safety consultants.