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.
5 ways digital safety checklists can improve efficiency
Create, clone and customise templates to save time
One of the big problems with paper checklists is that they are not easy to customise. Updating a paper checklist can quickly become messy and cause confusion, not to mention the environmental impact of printing and reprinting multiple forms. Digital checklists can be created, updated and shared from any device with Notify’s native audits app. Need to duplicate a checklist template? With digital software, you can easily clone an existing checklist and amend it online, so that it’s ready for your teams to use right away.
Schedule checklists
While some checklists might get used every day, others may only be used for monthly audits for example. When you’re not referring to a checklist regularly, it can be easy to forget about it. With Notify, you can schedule your checklists and set reminders so that those completing them can do so in a timely fashion. You can track if they’ve been completed, and if so, whether they have been completed on time – helping to support compliance with a digital audit trail.
Ensure data accuracy
With a digital safety checklist, you no longer have to decipher handwritten notes or manually type in answers or actions into a spreadsheet. Employees can complete their checks on the go via Notify’s native apps. With set questions and guidance text, you can be assured that checks are being carried out on time, to the right standard. Not to mention the data will be available in real-time for you and your safety teams to review too.
Quickly assign actions
As we know, the purpose of a safety checklist is to highlight hazards in the workplace and take steps to mitigate them as soon as possible. With a digital safety checklist, you can assign corrective actions to specific team members and track their progress through to completion. Your employees can then update and share their progress with you, encouraging engagement and accountability.
Visualise your audit data in one location
With Notify’s dashboards, you can bring all your audit data together in one place, giving you a clear view of how inspections are progressing. You can easily track KPIs by department or location, spot trends, and find areas where you can improve—all of which you can share with your board for better decision-making. Plus, having everything in one centralised location means you’ve got a built-in digital audit trail, making it way simpler to report to regulators when you need to. It’s an easier, smarter way to keep an eye on performance and stay on top of compliance.
Digital safety checklists are just one of many tools from Notify that can help drive efficiency and improve your safety processes. For more information or to try out our software for yourself, get in touch today and see how Notify can help make your workplace safer for all employees.
