Managing your OHS duties is a never-ending and difficult task. You must ensure a safe working environment for your staff and guests. As a foundation, you must have strong safety systems, procedures, job safety evaluations, and risk assessments in place.
Using these systems, you must assess, manage, and regulate risks to OHS. You must also teach your personnel safe work procedures and keep track of their continuous competency. In this post, we will look at employers’ responsibilities and what they must do to meet their OHS obligations.
Who is in charge of OHS?
In a nutshell, everyone. Employees can be classified as follows:
The Person Conducting Business or Undertaking (PCBU).
Officers.
Workers.
Other people at the workplace.
What are the employer’s OHS responsibilities?
The primary duty of care requires PCBUs to offer a safe working environment by reducing risks to health and safety to the greatest extent reasonably practical. The safety hierarchy of controls explains danger mitigation approaches in six steps to assist you.
The highest level of control for OHS hazards is risk elimination. However, removing hazards is not always practicable and may prevent a business from operating. If eliminating the risk is not achievable, the PCBU must reduce hazards to the greatest extent possible.
They are required to:
establish and maintain a safe and healthy working environment, including safe access to and from the workplace.
create and maintain safe plants, structures, and work processes that do not cause health risks.
Plants, structures, and substances must be used, handled, stored, and transported in a safe manner.
provide suitable facilities for workers’ welfare at work.
Workers must be informed, instructed, trained, or supervised so that they can work without endangering their own or others’ health and safety.
To prevent injury or illness caused by the operation of a business or endeavor, monitor worker health and workplace conditions.
maintain any property owned or managed by them to protect the health and safety of personnel inhabiting the premises.
Employers must also discuss, communicate, and coordinate with their employees and health and safety representatives on how to keep them and others safe at work in order to meet their OHS requirements.
How can interactive training assist you in meeting your OHS obligations?
Training is an important aspect of meeting your OHS obligations. Workplace learning procedures must include not only learning to replicate a work approach but also learning to develop a variety of techniques to deal with unplanned or abnormal events.
You should aim to incorporate learning about injury prevention measures and safe work practices into the context of your organization.
As part of your OHS requirements, you must constantly enhance and verify your employees’ safety knowledge. When delivering training, you must measure and monitor safety knowledge retention.
How can you increase your OHS knowledge?
Inform employees through inductions, board briefings, and training sessions.
Maintain an up-to-date risk register and ensure that access is granted.
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How do you confirm your OHS knowledge?
Examine the degree of participation at inductions, briefings, and training sessions.
Assess knowledge via conducting a survey, conducting a performance review, or evaluating contributions to risk assessments and OHS performance reviews, for example.
What are the processes and systems? Examine Your OHS Knowledge
Keep track of how many people attend safety inductions, briefings, and training sessions.
Use trustworthy online training platforms or ensure that people with adequate competence deliver the instruction.
Check the risk register for updates, such as reviewing the timeline and assigning accountability.
Conclusion
In this post, we will look at employers’ responsibilities and how they might meet their OHS obligations. Employers are responsible for providing a safe working environment, maintaining that environment and any plant and structures, and developing policies, procedures, incident action plans, and responses.
Critically, they must detect occupational hazards and health risks and implement the most stringent control measures possible to decrease the chance of damage or disease.
Employers must oversee, train, and monitor their employees’ health and well-being. They must also maintain up-to-date training records and analyze knowledge retention. It’s a big job that continues every day across all firms that are striving to achieve their OHS commitments and keep their employees safe and healthy.