What is a safety checklist?
Safety checklists are an important tool that you and your teams should use to identify, assess, and mitigate potential risks in the workplace. They are used to ensure that safety measures are in place for specific areas of work and to check that equipment is safe before your employees use it. They help identify potential hazards and any risks that may affect people, processes, or the environment
Every workplace will have different hazards and levels of risk, so a safety checklist is a good way to quickly establish a broad overview of where these hazards are and how they are being managed. While some organisations might complete a safety checklist on paper, we think using a digital safety checklist is easier and more efficient. With a digital safety checklist, you can quickly share information and actions with your team without the need for a complicated filing system or endless email chains.
A safety checklist might be completed every day as part of a task-specific routine, for example to check the mechanism of a piece of equipment before using it. You might also use a checklist for staff onboarding or training, particularly around new processes or equipment.
Why are safety checklists important?
The use of safety checklists is important to support compliance and to help prevent accidents and injuries occurring in the workplace. They are a comprehensive and methodical way to identify and manage hazards, making it easier to get ahead of risks.
As well as keeping your workplace safe, safety checklists can also support your teams in other ways…
With a digital checklist, employees can access this information wherever and whenever they need to. They can easily identify hazards, and assign corrective and preventative actions in just a few clicks – helping to quickly mitigate risk. Working digitally enables your teams to carry out these inspections on the go, on or offline, ensuring accurate information is captured in a timely fashion.
When you share safety checklists with employees, you also open up a positive communication channel between senior management and staff. This open dialogue promotes a shared understanding of the risks involved in various tasks.
Similarly, this collaborative approach to using digital safety checklists can improve your staff training and engagement in safety in the longer term. Using regularly updated safety checklists as part of staff training will boost the overall understanding of the risks they might experience at work. It also means that new employees have access to the most up-to-date information from the beginning and establishes health and safety as a priority for all employees. Using digital safety checklists makes it easier for employees to engage with health and safety at all levels, encouraging proactive behaviour around managing risk.
Finally, using a digital safety checklist makes it simple for employers to demonstrate compliance with health and safety regulations. You can clearly show that safety checks have been carried out on time to mitigate risk and improve safety at work. This gives you, your board and regulators assurance that reasonable steps have been taken to reduce the likelihood of an accident or injury occurring in your workplace.
What does a safety checklist look like?
When it comes to creating a checklist, you should consider all activities that happen in your workplace. This includes any machinery, equipment or vehicles that are used, as well as any workplace areas that could pose a risk to employees.
Typically, a checklist will have a series of questions that a member of staff has to complete to ensure that the equipment/vehicle is safe to use, or an area is safe to work in. These could be yes/no questions, open questions to provide context, or scoring questions to enable you to identify improvement opportunities.
One checklist that every workplace should follow is a slips, trips and falls checklist. These are the most common workplace hazards and the source of most workplace incidents. A slips, trips and falls checklist could include checking that there are no trailing computer wires in an office, ensuring that the correct signage is used for spills, or instructions for safe storage of cleaning equipment at the end of a shift.
Regardless of what your checklist includes, using a digital safety checklist can help make your inspections more efficient and easier to follow. Let’s look at 5 ways that Notify’s safety technology can improve your workplace safety processes with digital safety checklists.