You’re a small business owner, so you’ve already thrown yourself into learning everything you can about your industry. The idea of picking up an entirely new skillset from scratch, not to mention one tied so closely to intimidating regulations, might be making your head swim.
It’s okay, we just have to break it down and take it step-by-step.
As a small business, you have certain Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) responsibilities to yourself, your staff, and even your customers. It’s much easier to meet these responsibilities if you build your systems with them in mind.
In this article, we will break down the fundamentals of WHS for small business owners in NZ, so you know where to begin on your journey. We’ll also introduce you to our WHS Management App at the end, so you can consider a more technical, convenient way of systemising your WHS responsibilities.
First, Meet the PCBU: You
If you’ve read through any of the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA), then you’ve already seen the term ‘PCBU’. If not, it stands for a ‘Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking’, and it refers to the business itself. As the owner of said small business, that means you are the person responsible for ensuring the business meets its legal responsibilities.
If you don’t have a WHS management app or something similar, knowing what you are responsible for in a given moment can be a bit scary. When in doubt about what you have to do next, we recommend consulting the HSWA directly and looking for the responsibilities of the PCBU. This is an excellent first port of call.
As a PCBU, the core of your WHS responsibilities is fairly simple: you must ensure, so far as is ‘reasonably practicable’, the health and safety of your workers and anyone else influenced by your work. This might be yourself, your customers, or even visitors to your place of work.
You don’t have to guarantee that nothing bad ever happens. In fact, that is almost impossible. But you do have to show that you have put reasonable systems in place to prevent those accidents or mistakes from occurring as much as possible.
To do that, you need to…
Identify & Manage Your Risks
The very first practical step you can take is to walk out into your workplace now and take a look around. You might work on a construction site, in a single space like an office, or run a retail store. Regardless, the question to ask is always, “what creates a risk or hazard here?”.
Start by identifying the heavy hitters, and work your way to the finer details. Some examples of hazards you might be dealing with include:
- Physical hazards, like noisy machinery or heavy lifting.
- Environmental hazards, like extreme temperatures or a slippery floor.
- Psychosocial hazards, like high stress levels or tiredness.
That’s ‘identifying’ checked off. Once you’ve got a list of risks, the next step is to manage or minimise each one as much as is reasonably practicable. You can’t necessarily get rid of the noisy machinery if it is vital to your business, but you can equip your staff with appropriate PPE to manage the noise, and furnish them with requirements around how long they can be exposed to said noise.
It can take some time to manage or minimise every single risk, and document it. But once you’ve got it done, you have a clear series of site-specific risk management documents that outline exactly the level of the risk and how to deal with each one. That’s vital for everyone’s protection, and for showing that you have met your legal WHS responsibilities as a PCBU.
Pass Documentation to Your Team
You need to talk to your staff about safety and risk-management on-site. Your team members are on the ground with you every day, so they usually know about the near-misses or which pieces of equipment are starting to show their age.
It’s important to make safety a part of your culture in your workplace. You can do this by introducing Toolbox Talks, regularly training your staff on new safety procedures, or testing out their risk identification occasionally.
The goal is to create a culture that prompts a staff member to come up to you and say, “Hey, I think we should change how we do this,” before a risk becomes an accident.
Keep the Right Records
Finally, one of the most important obligations in WHS for small business owners is to keep a record of what you’ve done. It’s sometimes a headache to keep hold of that many documents, but if a WorkSafe inspector ever walks onto your site, they’re checking whether you have the right system in place.
They want to know whether you’ve identified risks, trained your people, and are staying on top of maintenance as much as is reasonably practicable. Having all of those processes documented and readily accessible will show the inspector that you’re meeting those obligations. Not to mention, you’ll also know exactly where they are in the event that you ever need them to navigate an incident on-site.
It’s that pile of never-ending paper that becomes a real problem, which is why we built the Site Connect WHS Management App. We wanted to turn that mountain of paperwork into a simple tool in every single staff member’s pocket.
The app sorts out a lot of things for you:
- Your staff members can check in digitally from their phones, so you know who’s on-site.
- Anyone can report a hazard or near-miss in real time, with photos.
- You’ve got all safety manuals and training records in a single place.
It’s the hub of a brand-new safety culture, making WHS for small business owners so much simpler. So, if your head is swimming with WHS responsibilities and you want to make sure you’re ticking everything off, this is a great place to start. Build your systems right, and you’ll never have to worry again.
Check out the WHS Management App for small businesses.
We build for the builders. Whether you’re managing one site or twenty, we at Site Connect have developed health and safety software that is extremely easy to use for you and your team.
Scale safely and meet all your WHS responsibilities without the cold sweat. Chat to us about a demo today.
