Challenges Employers Face To Comply With Safety When Starting A Business (And How To Overcome Them)

If you are starting your own business, one of the most important parts of your responsibilities is doing your due diligence to get health and safety protocols right. Firstly, to ensure the safety of your employees and customers. Secondly, to make certain that you are abiding by the law. And finally, for the self-assurance that in the event of a safety incident happening, everyone knows how to manage it in the best way.

In this article we shall look at the five most common safety compliance issues that new businesses face and later how to overcome them, to help you prevent incidents that could potentially cost your starting business money and months of lost productivity.

5 Safety Compliance Challenges New Employers Face When Starting Out

Challenge #1: Identifying Risks and Hazards

For new businesses, often the biggest challenge is being unable to immediately identify all the risks in the workplace. Granted, you will find some risks remain fixed over time, such as in the handling of equipment. But as the business grows and expands, the changing work environment presents new risks, and existing risks change in nature.

A business that does not effectively manage to identify risks early enough in its initiation runs a risk of staying caught in a perpetual loop of playing catch-up to safety protocols, which is costly, time consuming and a dangerous way to operate.

Challenge #2: Investigating Workplace Incidents

In industries with the highest risk, workers are usually required to perform repetitive motions. Without prior tracking information of hazards and near-misses, along with previous incidents and injuries, safety investigations become difficult since such systems are often still nonexistent at the start.

Challenge #3: Lack of Knowledge on Safety Laws and Regulations

As a new business owner or safety professional, it might be overwhelming to understand all the often-complicated safety laws and regulations, let alone keep up with them. They are constantly changing and evolving to create safer workplaces. This creates a knowledge gap that may lead to non-compliance, whose consequences can be quite fatal for your employees and business.

Challenge #4: Poor Communication Between Roles

In new businesses, silos and communication gaps tend to arise between departments and roles when it comes to safety compliance. Without an effective safety management system in place to streamline communication within an organisation, safety procedures between different departments could clash in approach.

Challenge #5: Lack of Employee Training

Across most major safety regulatory bodies in the world, it is a standard requirement for employers to train their employees on existing workplace hazards, at least once annually. The challenges for new businesses here range from acquiring the services of proficient health and safety personnel as trainers, to documenting and updating training sessions.

5 Simple Steps to Help New Businesses Maintain Safety Compliance

Step I: Set Rules That Match Regulatory Standards

The first step is setting clear safety rules and guidelines. The ideal approach is for safety handbooks to match the regulatory standards your business legally has to meet.

Step II: Invest in Early and Regular Training

The most important thing any company can do to improve workplace safety and meet safety compliance is to invest early in training. A significant amount of both time and money must be devoted to training employees the right way with competent safety professionals.

Step III: Maintain Safety Records

Good record keeping habits of close calls, self-inspections, safety training, and anything else connected to occupational safety are vital when dealing with safety regulatory agencies.

Step IV: Investigate All Incidents

Regulatory bodies commonly require reports for all workplace accidents that result in an injury or fatality. New business owners should make it a common safety practice to thoroughly investigate every close call, near miss and accident, whether they result in an injury or not.

Step V: Get Outside Help with Compliance Issues

The most viable way to keep up with compliance concerns is to outsource. Getting help from safety management system experts as a third party will present you with software solutions that can track, monitor, and maintain regulatory compliance in every aspect of your business’ workplace safety.

Conclusion

Keeping up with current but ever-changing safety regulations can be a daunting task for today’s business owner, let alone one that is just starting out. Workplace safety should be treated as a priority, not just for the sake of avoiding penalties from authorities and other direct business costs, but because it saves lives.

If you’re starting or buying a business and are keen on learning more about how to invest in and prioritise workplace safety and compliance today, give us a call.

Coyle Group can help your organisation with the arrangement of all documentation necessary for safety personnel recruitment and provide additional top-class compliance consultancy services.