How to Actually Set Up Effective Occupational Health Systems

Updated October 6, 2023
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Occupational Health Systems

How much you care about your company’s occupational health and safety standards can make or break your bottomline.

Take the July, 2016 case where the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) slammed a GBP 1.7 million fine on a company for ignoring to repair a faulty power station that ended up hurting an electrician.

The HSE emphasized the need for every employer and assigned-employees to become more responsible about occupational health systems management. From environmental, health and safety (EHS) managers to accountants to cleaners, OH is an organization-wide effort.

So, what are the must-dos to ensure workplace safety blossoms, helping you save thousands in potential HSE fines, injury compensations, employee recruitment and training costs, as well as losses in terms of reputation scathing.

Quick Guide to Setting up Occupational Health Systems that Actually Work

Here are a couple of actionable tips to help kickstart an effective occupational health system.

1. Identify Your Why

You’ll want to fist identify your goals for occupational health system implementation. That way you can know for sure what you are aiming at achieving and during what time period. You can then set up milestones and clearly communicate expectations to all employees or users before roll-out.

2. Onboard the Leadership

A good plan that fails to pass in the executive meetings will not see the light of day.

A persuasive way to convince executives to adopt your workplace safety idea is to sell them on the benefits of occupational health systems. You are an accountant (or you can work with accountants) to account for potential cost savings the company could save if it deployed a good occupational health program.

3. Preparing for Roll-out

With approval, you can go on ahead and create plans to roll-out the workplace safety program.

You want the plans to be as detailed as possible. Be sure to include important considerations such as the date and time of trainings and where (department) then plan will roll out first.

You can then follow up with conducting situational exercises to map workflow using occupational health software. Using a workplace safety software solution can help you to easily log incident history, recorded incident causes, notes on injured employees and their recovery details, and more.

It can also help you synch your company goals with EHS regulations so you know if you need to improve on anything to become compliant. You can also keep digital records of safety trainings, regulation changes, and monitor benefits by comparing incident histories before and after implementing the software.

4. Assign A Starting Point

To many firms, a major stumbling block to implementing occupational health programs is not knowing where to start and how.

You can start by delegating a starting point. How can you do that?

Have an individual, group, department or branch that acts as a first-adopter. You can then use guidelines outlined by international standards organizations such as HSE, ISO and OSHA to actually set and get the ground work in motion.

With time, the rest of the firm can learn how to effectively use the occupational health and safety system from the adopter, spreading the best practices across the firm.

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