To do this step successfully, you need to understand your work activities. If you are not fully engaged in the day-to-day running of the business, you should discuss this step with your workers or health and safety representatives (HSRs).
Learn more about consulting with your workers.
Hazards in the workplace are things that could cause harm, injury or ill health to a person and/or damage to a property. There are many ways to spot hazards in your workplace. A great way to identify hazards is to do a walk around at your workplace and talk to your workers to gauge their opinions and feedback. With their experience, they may have noticed things that are not immediately obvious to you.
WorkSafe's work health and safety checklists are a good place to start. Use the checklists that are appropriate to your business and industry. Ignore trivial issues and concentrate on significant hazards that could cause harm or affect several people.
Proper documentation is crucial in this step. Record your activity by using the hazard identification form. Note: Use one form for each hazard. Keep this as your paperwork and integrate all the identified hazards and their control measures into a safety action plan to monitor and track progress.
Case study: Spot the hazards
In April 2014, a small electrical installation business was fined $500 by the Magistrates Court of Western Australia for contravening the Occupational Health and Safety Regulations 1996 and ordered to pay court costs of $748. The business was fined because it failed to take reasonably practicable steps to identify a hazard, assess the risk arising from that hazard and neglected to consider ways to reduce the risk of the hazard.
The business installed solar panels and in February 2012 employed a qualified electrician, a trade assistant and labour hire apprentice electrician to install solar panels at a Mundaring property.
Before starting the work, the electrician got up on to the roof to have a 'look around' as a part of a general job safety analysis (JSA). A JSA is an informal risk assessment exercise. The electrician assumed that the roof was sheeted entirely with galvanised tin, however he failed to identify that one part of the roof was comprised of polycarbonate sheeting (skylights). In the building and roofing industry it is common knowledge that skylights are ‘non-trafficable’, meaning that they are not meant to be walked on.
The electrician and apprentice then commenced work on the roof. At about 10 am, the apprentice stepped backwards over the ridge of the roof onto the polycarbonate sheet. From there, he fell approximately 3.8 metres to the ground, requiring emergency surgery at Royal Perth Hospital to treat his injuries.
In this incident, the risk of suffering an injury or harm to health due to falling through the skylight is identified as a ‘hazard’, and during the course of his work, the apprentice was exposed to this hazard.
The business had a generic JSA for solar panel installation, however it did not include any requirement to check the integrity or composition of the roof surface. The copy of JSA was also not available for the workers on the day of the incident.
This incident could have been prevented if the business had more rigorous safe systems of work and procedures in place.
Read the prosecution summary.