How should you store a health and safety policy?

Where is the best place to store an organisation’s health and safety policy to ensure it is accessible?

The new universal standard for health and safety, ISO 45001, makes it clear that organisations need to create and implement a health and safety policy, but importantly sections five and seven of the standard (in particular) emphasise strongly the need to communicate the policy and keep it accessible and available to all workers.

That means a printed health and safety policy, in a folder, on the shelf in a manager’s office isn’t just missing the standard – it is a liability to your business. Even if workers have signed a document to say they read the H&S policy once – that is not enough. It should be available to them when and where they need it – when they are working.

This is a critical question for health and safety consultants too. Most H&S consultants are involved in creating relevant health and safety policies or management systems for their clients. However this work is undermined if the resulting policy is not made easily accessible to the client organisation and its staff on an ongoing basis.

The question is more than one of simple inconvenience – it could become a question of risk and liability for the consultant or organisation in the event of an injury or accident. Did the consultant/manager fulfil their duty when they printed a paper copy of a policy and didn’t make it easily accessible to employees and contractors?

This question is more relevant today than ever before with readily-available and affordable technology that can solve this issue.

Offer your team mobile access to H&S policies

SaferMe’s mobile safety system makes it simple to share a H&S policy with all workers in an organisation of any size.

The policy is securely hosted online and accessible via the SaferMe app, opening in the worker’s device whenever and wherever they need it. It is always available, it is easy to scale and to give access to contractors too.

It’s not just excellent accessibility – there are further benefits to offering mobile, digital access to your health and safety policy.

Firstly it allows you to appropriately segment the policy into sections to make it easier to digest and search, and with SaferMe you can even deliver access to relevant parts of the policy based on the employee’s role. This can make a document – which often runs into dozens of pages – more relevant than ever before to workers.

Finally, the SaferMe system allows you to see if someone has read a document and even get them to sign it off as read. You will know which workers are engaged and those who need to be given a helping hand.

Don’t drag the chain on getting your H&S policy in front of workers. Contact our team for a demo today to see how easy it is to use SaferMe to make your teams better engaged with safety.