Step 1
Assessing the risks
Building a robust safety system for your organisation is crucial.
The first step is to assess all potential risks to your employees, contractors and volunteers. This is the backbone of your protection policy, and needs to be comprehensive.
Identifying the risk profiles within your organisation
It is crucial to identify the various risk profiles and the range of risks within the business. For example, field-based engineers have different risk profiles to office-based staff, or salespeople working in and out of the office environment.
Protecting lone workers is our focus. According to the latest guidance from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) on protecting lone workers, the HSE outlined five different risk profiles of employees that work alone – namely:
- Working from home
- Working alone at a fixed base (e.g. shop, factory, warehouse)
- Working separately from others on the same premises or outside of normal working hours (e.g. cleaners, security officers)
- Working away from a fixed base (e.g. social workers, sales reps, engineers, HGV drivers)
- Volunteers carrying out work alone on behalf of charities/voluntary organisations
What should you to consider when creating a risk profile?
- Does the workplace present a special risk to the lone worker?
- Does travelling to and from the location present a special risk?
- Can one person adequately control the risks of the job?
- Does the lone worker travel out of the country?
- Is the person medically fit and suitable to work alone?
- Is there a risk of violence?
- What training is required for competency?
- Have they received the required training to work alone?
- How will the person be supervised?
- Are people of a particular gender especially at risk if they work alone?
- Are new or inexperienced staff especially at risk if they work alone?
- What happens if a person becomes ill, has an accident, or if there is an emergency?
- How can the lone worker summon assistance if required?
- Are there systems in place for contacting and tracing those who work alone?
Download the relevant Lone Worker Risk Profile Template Risk Assessment documents below:
Assess the risks for each risk profile
Once you’ve identified all of the risks in your risk profiles, you’re now ready to assess each of the risks (the ‘Risk Rating’ column in the relevant template).
HSE stipulates that “You need to do everything reasonably practicable to protect people from harm. This means balancing the level of risk against the measures needed to control the real risk in terms of money, time or trouble.”
To help you do this, we find that it’s helpful to create a matrix (as laid out in the spreadsheet) to evaluate the risks and help you define your approach to mitigating each risk, based on individual ratings.
It’s important when assessing risks to consider lone working in EVERY risk. For example, a risk of a medical emergency or fall is serious even when colleagues are around, but if nobody is around to assist, these can be fatal.
To assess risks, you should weigh up the LIKELIHOOD against SEVERITY of each risk to provide the risk rating. Use the table in the template document to guide you.
When you have documented all of the risks and assessed the severity of each, the next step will be to mitigate these risks, defining your control measures to reduce the risks you’ve identified.
Continually review the risks
Identifying and assessing risks must be regularly revisited. Risks constantly change and evolve as projects and businesses develop. You should also set aside time to formally review your risk assessments. Keep it up to date by reviewing every 6 months at least.
Good work!
If you’ve followed the guidance in this step you should have a comprehensive and well thought out risk assessment document. But we’re not done yet…
Next up, read through Step 2: Mitigating Risks to help define your control measures and reduce the risks you’ve identified.