Compliance at a glance - Introduction

The serious about safe business pack contains tools to help you identify what you need to do to make your workplace safer – and outlines how to do it.

The pack is a practical approach to help you achieve compliance and involves:

Management commitment – clearly defines your own responsibilities and those of your workers; provide the resources to meet those responsibilities; get involved.

Consultation – involve your workers when identifying and resolving safety issues.

Safe work procedures – identify the tasks that can pose a risk to your workers, take action to control the risks, develop simple procedures to manage any tasks where risks cannot be fully controlled.

Training and supervision – train your workers in the safe work procedures and ensure the procedures are followed at all times.

Reporting safety – have a process for reporting safety issues, such as hazards and incidents, and ensure you act on these reports.

Workers’ compensation and return to work – ensure your workers are covered by a workers’ compensation insurance policy and have an injury notification system and a return to work program to assist your injured workers.

Step 1 – How do you rate?

Use the compliance at a glance - how do you rate checklist to determine how you rate and understand what you need to do to improve safety in your workplace.

Step 2 – How do you improve?

The tools enable you to address issues that you identify in any of the above areas, and provide useful assistance whether you are starting from scratch or need only build upon what you already have in place.

When using these tools, consider the following:

• The best way to identify and resolve safety issues in your workplace is to involve your workers, and it is essential to have a clear understanding of each other’s responsibilities – as a first priority, address the issues in the advice sheets on management commitment and consultation.
• Together with your workers, prioritise those tasks that need to be addressed to improve workplace safety and develop realistic timeframes for their completion based on the complexity of the task and the available resources.
• Implementation of safe work procedures involves training your workers to ensure they understand the procedures and perform them correctly – and supervising your workers to ensure they always follow procedures.

Step 3 – Where can you get more assistance?

There is a range of additional services that can assist you to work through this process.

Also refer to further documents in this package:

• Compliance at a glance – How do you rate checklist
• Compliance at a glance – Management commitment
• Compliance at a glance – Consultation
• Compliance at a glance – Safe work procedures
• Compliance at a glance – Training and supervision
• Compliance at a glance – Reporting safety
• Compliance at a glance – Workers compensation and return to work