Your Ultimate Guide to Compliance in the Workplace
Contractor Compliance in the Workplace
All workplaces must fulfil a number of criteria under the law in order to keep their employees, contractors, visitors, or anybody else who may be on the premises safe. Breaking compliance can not only endanger lives but can also come with severe legal penalties.
The laws and responsibilities surrounding workplace health and safety compliance, however, are often complex. No two workplaces are exactly alike and therefore will not share the exact same risk factors and compliance issues. Good workplace compliance is structured around being aware of and assessing the risk factors and issues that may present themselves in your unique workplace and developing a plan for how to mitigate and handle them.
While each workplace, its risks, and the compliance issues it may experience are unique, they will share many common strategies for handling the planning, mitigation, and legal responsibilities of workplace health and safety.
In this article, we will provide the ultimate guide to workplace health and safety compliance. We will cover the different areas of compliance, the law that enforces them, and some strategies for the implementation of safeguards.
What is Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) Compliance?
Complying with Workplace Health and Safety laws and regulations involves taking steps to ensure that everybody who works or enters your workplace is as safe as they possibly can be. Compliance legislation is not only designed to protect employees, but customers, clients, contractors, visitors, or anybody else who may be involved with your business’s operations. At a basic level, to comply with Workplace Health and Safety laws, you must be continually assessing your workplace for new and existing threats to safety, and working to reduce, eliminate, or mitigate them.
The exact compliance obligations will vary depending on the industry and workplace environment, so it’s always a good idea to seek advice on your specific obligations. In principle, though, the obligations all businesses have are as follows:
Provide a safe working environment
Mitigate or eliminate risks when discovered
Perform a continual assessment to discover new or evolved risks
Provide information and training to employees on their WHS obligations and how to comply with them
Verify safeguards and risk elimination or reduction methods when dealing with dangerous substances, materials, or machinery
Provide up-to-date insurance and compensation policies for accidents and injuries
Meeting your Workplace Health and Safety compliance obligations will not only serve to keep people safe in your workplace but will also benefit the business by reducing costs relating to downtime and compensation claims, while also increasing staff retention and productivity rates.
Corporate Compliance Law: How to Ensure Your Workplace is Compliant
Complying with Workplace Health and Safety laws is easy if you follow some basic steps and incorporate them into your workflow and business decision making processes. Follow these checklist steps to help ensure your workplace is legally compliant:
Creating a risk management plan to aid in the identification and handling of risks and hazards
Regularly assess the work environment and procedures, ensuring they comply with safety best practices
Appoint a safety officer responsible for implementing the plan, assessing risks, and reporting incidents
Provide training and safety guidelines to staff both during on-boarding and at regular intervals
Workplace Health and Safety Legislation and the Chain of Responsibility
Chain of Responsibility has been a concept in Workplace Health and Safety law for a long time. In essence, the concept is that each person in the management chain is legally liable for breaches that occur in something they had oversight in. While the law is focused on heavy goods vehicles and their drivers, many of the provisions apply to the workplace in general.
Furthermore, recent changes to Chain of Responsibility mean that employers now need to take a more proactive stance on reducing and eliminating risk factors. Previously legal action could only be taken if an incident had occurred, however, under the new laws, the presence of an unaddressed risk alone is enough to suffer legal penalties. This change means that employers must take a much more proactive stance if they want to avoid breaching Workplace Health and Safety laws.
Here are some of the common places where breaches may occur:
Contracts — ensure contracts do not force employees to work longer hours than legally permitted
Timings — when setting work schedules, travel routes, and job completion times, make sure to have reasonable goals that will not force employees to exceed safe working hours.
Loads — all shipments and loads should comply with the legally specified weight limits and be packaged safely and securely.
Speed Limits — drivers should stick to the speed limits for the road and vehicles they are operating.
To find out more about your Chain of Responsibility and how the law has changed, read our articles here and here.
Contractor Risk Management
Contractors are often a necessity to augment the workforce in your business with either additional temporary staff or specialist skills. Without proper care, however, contractors can open you up to further health and safety risks. Permanent regular staff will have often gone through an extensive verification process before being hired; they may also have received further training on-the-job and will be experienced in the business’s work environments and the unique risk factors associated with them.
The contractors will almost certainly be capable of performing the job required and to the same level as permanent in-house staff, but when dealing with any unknown in a business, you should always be cautious and take additional steps to verify everything. At the very least, contractors will not be familiar with your unique workplace and procedures (even though they may have worked in similar environments), so should be given some form of safety training during their onboarding.
Check and follow these guidelines to ensure hiring contractors don’t open your business up to more health and safety risks:
Create clear minimum requirements by which to screen applicants
Prequalify all candidates against requirements; verify training and qualifications
Perform drug and alcohol testing
Arrange safety training, detailing the specific risks and operational procedures of your workplace
Provide detailed contracts clearly outlining the various responsibilities and obligations of both parties
Check the contractor has valid insurance for the work required
Read more about Minimising Risk When Hiring Contractors.
The Importance of Minimising Risk in the Workplace
There are nearly half a million workplace accidents resulting in injuries across Australia every year; nearly two hundred will end in a fatality. Thankfully, though, through tighter legislative controls and greater awareness of the risk factors, the numbers are on the decline.
The safer a workplace the less it will suffer from injuries and accidents. Working to keep your workplace safe is a legal requirement with severe penalties for non-compliance, but it also has many other benefits.
Decreased Downtime
Injuries and accidents cause staff to be off sick and can temporarily halt production. Decreasing the number of workplace injuries will serve to reduce the amount of sick time and downtime, which will ultimately save the company money.
Efficiency
Regular workplace assessments for health and safety risks can not only highlight risk factors but can also bring to light inefficiencies in your processes. A nice by-product of performing regular assessments is the ability to identify and eliminate these inefficiencies, saving the company time and money.
To find out more about the importance of minimising the risks in the workplace, read our in-depth articles here and here.
Conserve works with companies both large and small to help meet their legal obligations and keep their staff and contractors safe. Get in touch to find out how we can help you to increase health and safety in your workplace.
For more information, contact us at +61 2 8883 1501, enquiries@conserve.com.au or subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates.