Conducting a thorough safety risk assessment is your first line of defense against potential hazards. After all, in a bustling workplace, a small oversight could easily spiral into serious injuries or costly shutdowns. By prioritizing safety, you can prevent these scenarios and cultivate a culture that values vigilance and care.
Since safety management can be complex, a well-structured safety risk assessment is crucial. It allows you to quickly identify risks, implement controls, and track improvements effectively. This guide will walk you through the key steps and best practices for conducting effective safety risk assessments.
What is a safety risk assessment?
Conducting a safety risk assessment at your worksite is one of the best ways to protect your employees and company. When workers suffer an occupational injury or illness, it causes unforeseen expenses in the form of worker compensations and liabilities. In some cases, it’s not just both parties that suffer losses, the effects ripple through the rest of the workforce as workplace morale falters.
Through a safety risk assessment, you can minimize risks and even prevent them from happening. Intentionally walking through all aspects of your business to identify, analyze, and control workplace hazards will put you in the best position to improve your safety practices and better protect your employees and even the general public.
The objectives of a risk assessment are to:
- Determine the hazards present in the workplace and the people who are at risk
- Assess the severity of the risks even with control measures in place
- Implement more safeguards as necessary to mitigate the risks to the lowest level possible
Legal requirements and standards
A safety risk assessment is a legal requirement for employers based on the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. According to its provisions, every employer or self-employed individual must make sure to carefully examine and evaluate all the risks that can harm your workers and everyone else who may be affected by activities at the worksite.
Aside from this, several other laws and regulations govern safety risk assessments across various industries:
- Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 – Employers in the UK must conduct risk assessments and take necessary measures to control identified risks.
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Standards – In the US, OSHA enforces standards for safe and healthy working conditions. Employers must conduct risk assessments to meet OSHA’s regulatory requirements.
- European Framework Directive on Safety and Health at Work (Directive 89/391/EEC) – This directive requires EU member states to implement measures that improve the safety and health of workers, including safety risk assessments.
What are the most common health and safety risks?
In a report released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), over 1.8 million workers suffered work-related illnesses in 2022. At the top of the tally are these three common risks to occupational health and safety in the workplace:
1. Stress, anxiety, and depression
In 2022 and 2023, at least 850,000 employees suffered from mental health conditions because of excessive workloads, workplace violence, lack of management support, and work transitions. As a result, over 35 million working days were lost as absences rise. The industries with the highest record of workplace stress were in the HVAC supply industry, then next were public administration and healthcare.
To address this, employers must pinpoint workplace stressors and provide assistance to mitigate them. Hazards that affect mental health are often more tricky to identify as these can involve personnel (i.e. bullying and violence) or tasks (e.g. workload). In some cases, it could even be because of management (e.g. policies or transitions).
2. Musculoskeletal injuries
There were over 470,000 injuries because of workers doing tasks that require manual handling, repetitive actions, or awkward positions. Included in this are those working with keyboards. Despite the fact that the numbers have declined over the years, musculoskeletal injuries still prove to be persistent hazards that affect the workforce, especially in agriculture and construction.
Employers must revisit existing operational procedures and employee medical records to effectively identify which tasks are exposing workers to risks of musculoskeletal hazards.
3. Lung diseases
Approximately 12,000 deaths are linked to occupational respiratory issues. Workers are suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) and asbestos-related lung diseases. Asbestos is a dangerous substance that requires safety guards to mitigate personnel exposure. It is typically used in the construction and manufacturing industries.
When conducting a health and safety risk assessment, it is imperative to thoroughly check dangerous substances that are present, used, or produced and handle them using the appropriate personnel protective equipment (PPE).
How do you conduct a safety risk assessment?
One of the main reasons workplace hazards persist is because employers fail to identify the root cause of the hazards that are present in the workplace. According to the HSE, a risk assessment should be done before a job is started on a construction site to ensure that workers are protected and hazards are properly mitigated beforehand.
You can conduct a safety risk assessment by following these five steps:
1. Identify all hazards present in the workplace
One of the best ways to identify all the hazards at the worksite is to walk around the location and evaluate all machinery, personnel activities, dangerous substances, and work processes that can potentially result in any form of injury.
Hazards are commonly classified into these categories:
Let’s break these down into examples:
- Physical hazards such as slips, machinery, lifts, and falls
- Mental hazards such as workplace violence and workload
- Chemical hazards like asbestos and cleaning fluids
- Biological hazards like infectious diseases
- Ergonomic hazards like tasks that require manual handling and repetitive movements
It’s important to keep in mind that the occupational health and safety risk assessment will vary depending on the type of industry you’re in. The method will be different for an industrial worksite compared to an office setting.
As you conduct your risk assessment, consider also interviewing your personnel about their experiences and concerns. The people on the ground will most likely have valuable insight that can help you more effectively identify hazards that you might otherwise miss.
2. Determine who are at risk of exposure
After you’ve identified the hazards, you need to know who is at risk and how severe are the health threats from the hazards. Your employees aren’t the only ones with exposure hazards–take into account too even the safety of the general public. This pertains to the people who don’t work at the worksite but might still have exposure through business-related visits or product deliveries.
In construction sites, include the safety of pedestrians in the assessment. Falling debris and spilled chemical substances are just some examples of potential risks.
3. Implement control measures
The main goal of a risk assessment is to minimize the risks that hazards pose to personnel and the public. This entails setting appropriate corrective actions where needed. Depending on the identified risks, your control measures could be one or a combination of the following:
- Elimination: Complete removal of the risk from the worksite or activity.
- Substitution: Replacement of the material, process, or substance into something less dangerous.
- Engineering controls: This can come in the form of fall protection and machine guards.
- Administrative controls: Safety policies and protocols that contribute to carrying out work safely.
- Personal protective equipment (PPE): This provides workers with added protection against hazards.
4. Document your findings using safety risk assessment forms
When it comes to risk assessment, documentation is critical. This will serve as proof of compliance and most importantly, the foundation of your health and safety program. Consolidate all gathered data, interviews, and visual documentation into a report and analyze them. Give comprehensive descriptions too of the hazards, as well as the corrective actions.
5. Monitor and update
Even after you’ve implemented corrective actions, make sure to regularly monitor execution and progress. Risk assessments are not a one-time thing. Update them every time your company goes through any changes or transitions that can increase the risks of hazards in the workplace.
Tools and techniques for prioritizing risks
A key step in risk assessments is prioritizing risks. This way, you can focus your efforts and resources on the most critical hazards that could threaten your team and operations. Here are some common methods for evaluating and ranking these risks:
Risk matrix
A risk matrix is a go-to tool across various industries for visualizing and prioritizing risks based on their severity and likelihood. It is typically a grid with severity on one axis and likelihood on the other.
You plot each hazard on the matrix, which helps you categorize risks into low, medium, high, or critical. Hazards that land in the high or critical zones are the ones that you need to tackle first.
Risk scoring
Risk scoring is a straightforward but effective method. Each hazard gets two scores: one for its severity and another for its likelihood. Multiply these scores together to get an overall risk score.
For example, you might use a scale of 1 to 5 for both severity and likelihood. Once you get the overall score for each hazard, you can rank the hazards by priority. The higher the score, the more urgent the need for control measures.
Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
FMEA is a more detailed technique for analyzing failure modes and how they affect a system. A failure mode is essentially how a process or product might fail to perform its function.
Each failure mode is given multiple scores based on its severity, how often it might occur, and how likely it is to be detected. These scores are multiplied to get its risk priority number (RPN). The RPN allows you to zero in on which failure modes need attention first.
On top of these frameworks, you can also leverage safety risk assessment form templates to streamline the assessment process and ensure that every important step is done thoroughly. These help you list the information that needs to be collected so you can effectively conduct an analysis that will allow you to set appropriate control measures.
A digital solution for safety risk assessments
Regularly carrying out a health and safety risk assessment is one of the key tasks to reduce hazards for the company and the employees. If a paper-based method is used, the process can be lengthy and inefficient. This in turn leads to delays when it comes to prioritizing hazard reduction.
Protect your teammates and yourself by regularly checking compliance with all internal standards via Lumiform’s software and mobile app. Here’s a case study of how this works:
x
Lumiform’s digital solution brings you the following advantages:
- Generate real-time data about your processes. This makes quality and safety measurable for the first time and you can use the data to continuously improve processes.
- All results, images and comments are automatically bundled in a digital report.
- In addition, we offer more than 12,000 templates in our library to help companies get started digitally in no time.
- The very simple operation offers no room for error for auditors on site. The app offers less complexity in documenting or completing checklists than complicated paper or Excel lists.