Can You Be 100% Health and Safety Compliant All the Time?

WorkNest has been the risk management partner to Towergate Insurance Brokers for almost a decade, together supporting employers’ proactive health and safety management and providing a buffer against the consequences of non-compliance.

Health and safety law doesn’t demand that all risks be eliminated; it requires employers to find “reasonably practicable” solutions to reduce them.

The Health and Safety Executive applies this general term to every type of workplace, from the manufacturing floor to retail stores and offices – and everything in between. But what does it really mean? How can organisations be confident that they are doing everything “reasonably practicable” to reduce risks?

In our upcoming free webinar, WorkNest’s Director of Health & Safety Services and former HSE Inspector, Nick Wilson, explains whether it’s possible, or even desirable, to strive for 100% compliance 100% of the time. Plus, he will uncover the top five most common errors we see employers make when compiling and conducting risk assessments and how to avoid them.

03 October at 14:00

When it comes to health and safety, situations and risks can change minute by minute. This is what makes remaining in a constant state of compliance so challenging, and some would argue near-impossible.

With this in mind, one of the pivotal questions employers need to ask themselves is, are they striving to be compliant or safe? After all, legislation comes out reactively not proactively, so if your aim is simply to ‘tick all the boxes’, is your workplace really safe, or are you just meeting minimum required standards? Could more be done to genuinely and meaningfully manage risk?

During this session, our expert will draw on their extensive knowledge of working closely with clients of all sizes and sectors to unpick whether, in practice, being ‘compliant’ should be the key focus of employers’ health and safety efforts, or whether this promotes a bare-minimum approach whereby organisations only do what’s legally necessary to prevent accidents and ill health and not what’s actually required.

At the same time, introducing overly-restrictive, cautious measures can detrimentally impact your operations and your bottom line. So how can organisations get the balance right in order to remain productive and ultimately profitable? How should employers differentiate between which measures are truly important to protecting their workforce and workplace, and which measures fall outside of what’s considered “reasonably practicable”?

Join WorkNest’s Director of Health & Safety Services, Nick Wilson, as he explains how organisations can take a sensible, proportionate approach to workforce health and safety management and tackles pertinent questions such as:

• Is it possible, or even desirable, to be 100% compliant 100% of the time?
• Is it better to strive to be compliant or safe?
• What do organisations identify as “reasonably practicable” safety measures? And what falls outside of this scope?
• What are the top 5 most common mistakes employers make with regard to risk assessments, and how can you get these right?

If you have a particular question(s) relating to any of the points above, we welcome you to submit them in advance via the registration form. Nick will endeavour to answer as many as possible during the session.

Register below

Meet our hosts

Nick Wilson

Director of Health & Safety Services

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