Health and Safety Checklists

The use of health and safety inspection checklists can also help organizations apply the latest best practices for situations or changes in the workplace that impact lives and livelihoods.

In this article

• What are the 5 Elements of Safety?
• How Can You Identify Health and Safety Problems?
• Health and Safety Inspection App
• Health and Safety Checklists

What are the 5 Elements of Safety?

A behavior-based program in the workplace is the first step toward an effective safety culture, but it isn’t the only step. More than using health and safety checklist templates, a safety culture is an alignment of attitudes, beliefs, and values across teams in an organization in relation to safety. Collaboration is vital in ensuring an effective organizational safety culture so that everyone makes a conscious effort to promote their own and others’ safety. Focusing on the elements below will help in creating and promoting a collaborative safety culture.

• Leadership
  Leading by example is the best way to promote a strong safety culture in an organization. Leaders should demonstrate the model for safe and healthy behavior that everyone else can follow. As such, people in management should have a firm grasp of the elements and principles of safety and good health.

• Responsibility
  A sense of responsibility should be shared by everyone in the organization so that a safety culture can be promoted and implemented. Each individual within the organization should share the belief that they are all morally and ethically bound to act in a way that safeguards and promotes the health and safety of fellow employees, the company, and society as a whole.

• Accountability
  Management teams and team leaders should be held accountable for the people they oversee. Setting an example is vital because the behavior of leaders will influence the behavior of those around them. This also means that promoting a safety culture should be integrated into the responsibilities of leaders.

• Clear expectations
  The expectations that come with creating an organization-wide safety culture should be set at the onset and communicated properly to everyone across the organization. Commitment to an organization’s safety culture must come from the top because the quickest way to spread this commitment is from the top down. Employees will be encouraged to adhere to and promote a safety culture if it’s evident that their leaders are committed to the cause.

• Ethics
  It should go without saying that management systems should be driven by ethics—and it’s the same with the creation of a safety culture. The goal of a strong safety culture is not only to ensure that employees adhere to set safety rules, they should also make decisions that are moral and ethical. A company should hire people that share its core values and that know how to make rational and ethical decisions in their everyday lives.

How Can You Identify Health and Safety Problems?

Every workplace will have hazards; depending on the industry, businesses will have to contend with different types of hazards that come with the job. The question is, are these hazards avoidable, and can they be identified before they cause untoward incidents? It is an employer’s legal responsibility to look after employees and protect them from health and safety hazards in the workplace, and knowing the common types of hazards is the first step in avoiding work-related accidents and injuries.

• Physical hazards
  This is the most common workplace hazard. Contrary to popular belief, physical hazards don’t need to make contact with a person to cause harm. These include extreme temperatures, prolonged exposure to the sun, radiation, and constant exposure to loud noises.

• Ergonomic hazards
  Ergonomic hazards are present when the nature of work places employees under stressful conditions or in situations where the body is put under significant strain. Ergonomic hazards are often unrecognized because the harm that they cause is not immediate. Some conditions that pose ergonomic hazards include non-ergonomic workstations, frequent lifting without following best practices, repetitive movements, repeated forcible motion, and exposure to constant and excessive vibration.

• Chemical hazards
  Chemical hazards are present if workers are exposed to any harmful chemical substance in any form (solid, liquid, or gas). Different substances have different levels of risk and different people will have different levels of tolerance to different chemical substances. Chemical hazards include pesticides, cleaning solvents, flammable substances, dangerous gases, and vapors and fumes from welding or solvents.

• Biological hazards
  Biological hazards are present when the nature of work involves working with animals, infectious plants, and bacteria and viruses that can cause adverse health effects.

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