Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston)
A risk assessment is good for your business. As well as minimising the chance that your employees and customers get hurt, you also reduce your insurance premiums, so you can make more of a profit.
A risk assessment is to make sure that you’re taking sensible measures to reduce the amount of risk in your business or workplace. You are probably already taking measures to make sure that your employees aren’t at excessive risk, but a risk assessment will tell you if you need to do more.
How Do I Assess the Risk?
Start by simply walking around your workplace and look for any hazards. They could be anything that could cause harm. Then, think about the risks of these hazards. What is the chance that someone could be harmed by that hazard? How serious would that harm be?
Get your employees involved too – what do they think might be a hazard? Is there something that could be done to make them feel safer? They might have a different perspective to you and they might see a hazard that you don’t, and they may also be able to see a better way of reducing that risk.
Once you have identified the real risks, and ways that you can reduce and control them, you need to put measures in place.
It’s always good to keep a record of your risk assessments, even if you don’t have to. If you have less than five employees, then you’re not required to write it down, however you are encouraged to.
Baseline Risk Assessment
Baseline risk assessment is an initial risk assessment that identifies the major risks to your business as a whole. This is what you’d do before doing anything else, and will likely lead to other, more in depth risk assessments. They might include fire risk, environmental impact, noise, lighting and more.
Continuous Risk Assessment
Continuous risk assessment is essential for business, as it’s an environment that rarely stays the same. This will reduce risk in itself – as it means you are more likely to identify hazards as they arise, rather than leaving it until it is too late, i.e. when someone gets hurt.
Reducing Risk
There is a plethora of ways that you can reduce risk in the workplace. However, while an office environment does pose its risks, somewhere that deals with chemicals is a whole lot riskier. This is where you have to take risk assessment much more seriously, and get professionals, like bibra – toxicology advice & consulting, in to do the job for you. They will make sure that you are doing everything you can to reduce the risk of chemical harm to both your employees and your products themselves.