By Joanna Weekes

Today we have a quick reminder about an important part of implementing your health and safety policies.

While there are no strict legal requirement about where and how health and safety policies and procedures are displayed in your workplace, an obligation does arise under health and safety legislation that necessitates the publication of your company policies and procedures. It’s the duty to provide and maintain safe systems of work, and to provide such information, instruction and training to your workers as is necessary to enable them to perform their work in a safe way.

Therefore, it is important to consider how best to communicate your policies and procedures to your workers to ensure they are understood and implemented.

How should you communicate your policies to your workers?

Among other things, your company policies and procedures should be easily accessible by everyone in your company, in either hard copy or electronically.

Make sure that you inform all your workers of where they can access the documents.

And remember, your policies and procedures are not effective unless you:

• train your workers in them;
• supervise and monitor your workplace to ensure they are being complied with;
• update your policies and retrain your workers when a change occurs in the workplace; and
• provide leadership that commits to healthy and safety and encourages workers to do the same.