Many modern workplaces seem to be moving at a million miles an hour nowadays. With everything going on, from the increasing prevalence of remote working to changing employer responsibilities, it can be difficult to keep up with your actual legal obligations. Today, we decided to go right back to the basics of workplace safety, looking at how to approach water-related risks in the modern workplace.
Understanding your legal responsibilities
To get things back to basics, it’s important to understand your legal responsibilities regarding water safety in the modern workplace. While employers now have a range of new responsibilities towards their employees, from providing mental health support to expert financial advice, the basic responsibilities of running a business haven’t gone anywhere.
One of your most foundational responsibilities as an employer, outlined under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, is to provide your employees with access to safe, reliable water sources. This should help to underline the importance of everything else that follows in this article: providing access to safe water isn’t some optional extra. It’s an important legal duty that mustn’t be overlooked.
Tying everything together
No matter how advanced your technological approaches are to water safety, you need to be able to tie everything together to keep a handle on things. In practical terms, this means developing a comprehensive water safety plan, and possibly a Legionella risk assessment, too.
Essentially, this will be a document that outlines all of the approaches you implement to mitigate a range of water safety-related issues. From the clear assignment of responsibility to individuals in your organisation to the results of previous water risk assessments, keeping this document organised and up to date is absolutely critical.
Increasing awareness
An effective way of ensuring water safety in most situations is to increase overall awareness within your organisation. By providing a range of water safety-orientated training courses, you can help to ensure that the majority of people who spend time in your workplace at least know what to look out for in terms of imminent water-related risk factors.
Combined with clear reporting systems, this dramatically increases the probability that potential issues are seen and reported on sooner rather than later, thereby decreasing the chances of a critical event occurring.
Constant reassessment
Lastly, no matter how effective your current strategy is, it’s imperative that you constantly look for ways to improve on it. Whether by taking seriously the findings of risk assessments or adopting new, innovative water safety technologies, this approach to ongoing optimization can significantly impact the efficacy of your water safety strategy.
The importance of water safety remains just as high today as it did a hundred years ago. While the risks we faced then haven’t gone anywhere, the solutions we have access to have improved dramatically. By treating water safety as a complex issue that requires a well-thought-out and constantly adapting approach, you should be able to keep incidents to an absolute minimum.
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