Managing Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) on-site is all about identifying hazards and reducing risks to keep everyone safe. The most important thing you can do is make sure that everyone on-site takes WHS seriously, from the supervisor to the apprentice.
When it comes to your WHS requirements and the paperwork side of things, we can set you up with a digital WHS system to make it really simple and give you confidence that you’re doing all the right things on-site, in the right way.
If you’re looking for a detailed list of all the WHS tasks you should be checking off as a home builder, download the Residential Construction Health and Safety Checklist.
Key WHS construction requirements
- Provide a safe working environment: You must ensure that your site is safe and free from hazards that could cause harm to your employees or others.
- Put in place a WHS management system: You should have a documented system that outlines how you will manage WHS risks in your workplace. This system will include processes for identifying, assessing, and controlling risks. In a lot of cases a construction project requires a Site Specific Safety Plan. Copying and pasting one site plan for all your builds won’t cut it. With our guided WHS system, this can be really simple, we promise it’s not as hard as it sounds.
- Check your contractors are up to scratch and will operate safely on site: This includes checking they have good WHS practices in place and checking they have the appropriate insurances to be operating.
- Educate and communicate with workers on-site: Make sure everyone on-site has the appropriate training, instruction and information they need to carry out their work safely.
- Make sure a Safe Working Method Statement (SWMS) is completed prior to High Risk Construction Work starting on-site: The SWMS needs to be specific to the task at hand. Using the same SWMS every time you do a task could cause more harm than good.
- Monitor WHS performance: You should regularly monitor your WHS performance to identify any areas where improvements can be made.
- Report all incidents: It’s important you report all incidents including near misses. Ensure you take incidents and near misses seriously and investigate them. Investigations help you to understand the cause so you can put corrective actions in place to prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future. Certain incidents may be considered Notifiable incidents and as such need to be promptly reported to the regulator.
We can help you to manage WHS in the simplest way possible. The HazardCo system is guided, which means you don’t need to be a fancy WHS expert to use it. The software does the heavy lifting and puts WHS tools into everyone’s hands on-site.
Get a free 7-day trial of the HazardCo health and safety system.
Back