Establishing policies and procedures

Having clear policies and procedures in place will help you minimise workplace health and safety risks and protect your workers.

Why have a safety policy?

Having a policy shows you’re committed to safety and preventing work-related injury and illness. It also sets the rules and standards you expect everyone to follow.

Why have safe work procedures?

Having safe work procedures in your workplace means that everyone will know the safe way to do their job.

Safe work procedures should:

• clearly explain how to perform the task (step-by-step)
• point out any potential risks involved in the task
• tell you how to eliminate that risk to avoid injury or damage.

Your procedures will provide a useful tool for training and supervising your workers.

Where do I start?

The procedures you will need in your business will vary based on the industry you're in and the hazards in your workplace.

Make sure you include your workers when developing your policies and procedures. They know the tasks they perform better than anyone, which means the procedures will be realistic and more likely to be followed.

You can use the tools below to develop your safe work policy and procedures:

• Sample health and safety policy (DOCX, 0.02 MB)
• Work health and wellbeing policy template (DOCX, 0.43 MB)
• Workplace rehabilitation policy and procedures template (DOCX, 0.61 MB)
• Task analysis template (DOC, 0.05 MB)
• Safe work procedure template (DOC, 0.08 MB)
• Hazard identification checklist (DOC, 0.11 MB)
• Safe work method statements

When to review your policies and procedures

You need to review them when:

• you have an incident at your workplace
• changes occur in the workplace
• your workers tell you the procedure doesn’t work
• rules or regulations change.

How do I know if I'm managing safety effectively?

Use the Safety fundamentals toolkit to see how well you're doing. From your results page, you can download an action plan as a Word document and change it to suit your business.