The seven steps
- Assess how you're doing
- Find the root of the issues
- Make it fit with what you do
- Lead this in your company
- What's in it for your team
- How your team can carry it out
- Make it last
Step 3: Make it fit with what you do
Introduction
Important! Before beginning this step you should have completed:.
- STEP 1 - Used the Health and Safety Diagnostic Tool (HSDT)
- STEP 2 - Understood why mistakes happen and got your workers engaged
This step will help you to understand the key risks to health and safety in construction.
The aim is to show you how leadership and worker involvement can contribute to preventing accidents and ill health on construction sites.
The health and safety risks section provides advice to help you understand the top health and safety risks in construction, and resources on how the right actions by both managers and workers can control these risks.
Further Tools demonstrates how you can show leadership by reviewing your health and safety policy, and by getting involved, and involving others, in the process of risk assessment. A guidance note on the 'Management of risk when planning work' sets out the key principles that everyone should apply to help manage risk better.
Health and safety risks
Use the pdf downloads below to brief your workforce on the most common health and safety risks and how to prevent them arising in the first place.
Safety risks
- Fall from a ladder
- Fall through a roof
- Lifting operations
- Struck by plant
- Overturning plant
- Fall from scaffolding
- Fall through an internal void
- Asphyxiation poisoning
- Crushed by falling excavation
- MEWP crushing entrapment
Health risks
Further tools
Here are some more tools that can help you improve your organisation's health and safety.
Your health and safety policy should drive your overall direction on health and safety and act as a constant reference to your company's attitude to it. Using this template will help you to examine your own policy, in order to see how to incorporate leadership and worker involvement.
Your risk assessment is much more likely to work if you involve your workers, as they are the ones who have to deal directly with hazards in the workplace. The 'Engaging Your workers in risk management' tool will help you to do this.
Engaging your workers in risk management
This guidance on the 'Management of risk when planning work' sets out simple key principles of risk control which everyone should know.
Summary
Making improvements to your overall health and safety management system/processes by involving your workers will help you to create a work environment that encourages safe behaviour. This will help you to tackle the real causes of accidents, incidents and ill-health.
You can bolster your health and safety management by:
- providing leadership to set and maintain good health and safety standards
- involving workers when assessing risks
Before moving on to the next section you should at the very least:
- have used the Case Study tools outlining the health and safety risks arising in various scenarios and considered how to use these tools to help others in your organisation learn about risk
- have reviewed your company's health and safety policy to include clear statements that help drive your health and safety standards
- have created an action plan to involve workers in risk assessments and measurements of health and safety performance wherever possible