Health & Safety

Health and safety is not optional — regardless of your industry. Legal obligations aside, your team faces real hazards every day. Kitchens and manufacturing floors present burns and cuts. Warehouses, retail stockrooms, and construction sites involve heavy lifting and working at height. Offices bring DSE and stress risks. Healthcare settings involve biological hazards and lone working. The consequences of poor management range from minor injuries to fatalities, prosecution, and business closure.

Most businesses know they need to manage health and safety. Fewer actually do it well. The gap is not usually knowledge — it is execution. Risk assessments get written and filed. Policies exist but nobody reads them. Checks should happen daily but get skipped when it is busy.

The business case is clear:

Legal duty — employers must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of employees. Failure can mean prosecution, fines, and even imprisonment.
Insurance — most policies require documented safety procedures. Without them, claims may be denied.
Reputation — a serious incident makes the news. A prosecution is public record. Recovery takes years.
Staff wellbeing — people who feel safe at work perform better, stay longer, and trust their employer.

A complete health and safety programme has three parts:

Using Pilla for Health and Safety Risk Assessments

Identify hazards before they cause harm

Using Pilla for Health and Safety Checks

Checks that become habit

Using Pilla for Your Health and Safety System

A system your team will actually use

The three parts form a system: risk assessments identify hazards and controls, your documented system communicates those controls to your team, and daily checks verify the controls are actually working. Each part depends on the others — risk assessments without checks are paperwork. Checks without risk assessments do not know what to look for. Neither matters if your team has not been trained on the procedures.

Part 1: Identifying and controlling risks

Risk assessment is a legal requirement, but it is also the foundation of everything else. Without it, you are guessing at what could hurt your team, and guessing at how to prevent it.

In practice, risk assessment means working through a structured process: identify the hazards in your workplace, assess who might be harmed and how, evaluate the risks and decide on controls, record your findings, and review them regularly. This is not a theoretical exercise. It means walking your premises — every floor, every workspace, every storage area — looking at what actually happens, not what should happen in an ideal world.

Every workplace has hazards, and they vary by sector and area. Kitchens and food production areas present burns, cuts, slips on wet or greasy floors, and manual handling injuries. Warehouses and retail stockrooms involve heavy lifting, forklift traffic, and racking collapses. Construction sites bring working at height, falling objects, and plant machinery risks. Offices involve DSE hazards, stress, and electrical risks. Healthcare and care settings add biological hazards, patient handling, and lone working. Bars and late-night venues face glass breakage, violence, and noise exposure. Events add temporary setups, unfamiliar environments, variable weather, and crowd management.

The law does not require risk assessments to be perfect. It requires them to be suitable and sufficient — proportionate to the actual risks. A small shop does not need the same depth of assessment as a large manufacturing facility, but both need to cover the hazards their teams actually face. The five-step approach (identify hazards, decide who might be harmed, evaluate risks and decide on precautions, record findings, review and update) gives you a practical framework that scales to any size of operation.

Risk assessments must be living documents. Review them after any incident or near-miss, when you change equipment or procedures, when you bring in new staff, when you move or refurbish premises, and at least annually even if nothing has changed. A risk assessment written three years ago and never reviewed is worse than useless — it gives a false sense of security and will not impress an inspector.

Common risk assessments include premises safety, kitchen or production area hazards, manual handling, fire safety, COSHH (control of substances hazardous to health), violence and aggression, work-related stress, lone working, working at height, display screen equipment, and slips, trips, and falls. Most businesses need at least eight to ten of these to cover their significant hazards adequately, with additional sector-specific assessments depending on the nature of the work.

How Pilla helps with risk assessments

Pilla provides risk assessment templates as structured work items that guide your team through each step of the process:

Guided completion with prompts for identifying hazards, assessing who is at risk, and defining controls — so nothing gets missed
Review scheduling that automatically flags when assessments are due for review
Tracking so you can see which assessments are current and which need attention
Risk assessment templates covering the hazards your team actually faces — from premises safety and manual handling to violence, stress, and lone working

Part 2: Checks that verify your controls

Risk assessments identify what controls you need. But controls only protect people if they are actually in place. A fire exit that should be kept clear is useless if someone has stacked boxes in front of it. An emergency lighting system that should work is useless if the batteries are dead. Checks are how you know your controls are working — not in theory, but in practice, today.

Paper-based checks have the same fundamental problems as paper-based food safety records. Staff fill in a week's worth of checks at the end of the shift. Clipboards go missing. Different people interpret the same check differently. There is no way to verify when a check was actually done, or whether the person doing it was thorough. When an inspector asks for last month's fire alarm test records, you need to find the right folder, hope the sheets were filed, and hope they were filled in at the time rather than retrospectively.

The range of safety checks any business needs to conduct is broad. Fire safety alone involves weekly alarm tests, monthly emergency lighting tests, regular checks of fire exits, fire doors, and fire extinguishers. First aid requires regular checks of kit contents, AED status (if you have one), and ensuring trained first aiders are on shift. Equipment checks cover PPE condition, ladders and step stools, and any work equipment covered by your risk assessments. Opening and closing safety checks ensure the premises are safe for staff and visitors at the start and end of each day.

Frequency depends on the check and, in some cases, on legal minimums. Fire alarms must be tested weekly. Emergency lighting must be tested monthly (with a full discharge test annually). First aid kits should be checked at least monthly. Opening and closing safety checks happen daily. Other checks — PPE condition, ladder inspections, fire door checks — may be weekly or monthly depending on use and risk.

Good records contain five things: who did the check, when they did it, what they checked, what they found, and what action they took if something was wrong. Without all five, the record is incomplete. An entry that says "fire exits — OK" tells an inspector nothing. An entry that says "Jane Smith checked all three fire exits at 08:15 on 12 January, all clear, no obstructions" tells them everything they need to know.

How Pilla helps with daily checks

Pilla turns your safety checks into scheduled work items that staff complete on their phones:

Scheduled check templates that appear when due — weekly fire alarm tests every Monday, monthly emergency lighting tests on the first of the month, daily opening checks at the start of each shift
Timestamped completion records that cannot be backdated — you know exactly when each check was done
Photo evidence for visual verification — a photo of a clear fire exit is more convincing than a tick box
Completion analytics showing which checks get done and which get missed — so you can address patterns, not just individual failures
A library of check templates covering fire safety, first aid, equipment, and opening and closing safety

Part 3: A documented system your team actually uses

If you employ five or more people, you are legally required to have a written health and safety policy. Even below that threshold, documenting your arrangements is good practice — and expected by insurers. The policy must include a general statement of intent (signed by the most senior person), the organisation of responsibilities (who does what), and the specific arrangements for managing each significant hazard.

The traditional approach is a health and safety manual — a lever arch folder containing the policy statement, risk assessments, safe systems of work, training records, and procedures for everything from fire evacuation to manual handling. The problem is that nobody reads it. It sits on a shelf in the manager's office, gathering dust until an inspector visits or an incident forces someone to dig it out. New starters might be shown it during induction, but they will not remember a 200-page document they flicked through on their first day.

Video-based training systems solve this problem. Instead of describing how to lift a heavy load safely in a written procedure, you show someone doing it. Instead of a written fire evacuation procedure, you record a walkthrough of your actual escape routes. Demonstrations are more effective than descriptions for practical tasks — and most workplace safety is practical. A two-minute video of the correct way to use a step ladder in your specific premises, with your specific equipment, is worth more than ten pages of generic guidance.

A complete system covers your general policy statement (your commitment to health and safety and how you will deliver it), organisation (who is responsible for what — from the owner's overall duty down to individual staff responsibilities), arrangements for each significant hazard (the specific procedures, controls, and safe systems of work identified in your risk assessments), and monitoring and review (how you check the system is working and how often you update it).

Training records are critical. It is not enough to have procedures — you need proof that staff have been trained on them. An inspector who asks a warehouse operative about manual handling procedures and gets a blank look will not be satisfied by a written policy that covers the topic. You need evidence that the operative received training, when they received it, and what it covered. Video training with tracked viewing gives you exactly this.

How Pilla helps with your H&S system

Pilla helps you build a health and safety system your team actually engages with:

Record short videos showing your specific procedures for each topic — manual handling in your workplace, fire evacuation from your building, chemical handling with your products
Blog articles guide you on what to cover in each video, so you do not have to start from scratch
Track who has watched which training videos — giving you the training records inspectors want to see
Update easily when procedures change — record a new video rather than rewriting a document nobody will read
Topic-specific guides covering the key aspects of a workplace health and safety system, from slips and trips to stress, violence, and working at height

The complete safety cycle

The three parts of health and safety form a continuous improvement cycle:

Risk assessments identify what could go wrong and what controls you need
Your documented system communicates those controls to your team through video training
Daily checks verify that controls are working in practice
Incidents and near-misses trigger review of assessments and controls
The cycle continues — assess, document, check, review, improve

This cycle is the difference between compliance theatre (a folder of policies nobody follows) and actual workplace safety (consistent practices that protect your team). Paper-based systems break this cycle because records get lost, checks get backdated, and the folder on the shelf drifts further from daily reality. Digital records with timestamps, completion tracking, and analytics keep the cycle working.

Getting started

Where you start depends on where you are:

If you have nothing documented — start with risk assessments. You need to understand your hazards before you can manage them. The risk assessments guide walks you through the process.
If you have risk assessments but paper-based training — start with the H&S system guide to move to video-based delivery. Your risk assessments have identified the controls; now you need to communicate them effectively.
If you have documented systems but checks are inconsistent — start with checks to verify your controls are actually working. Digital scheduling and tracking will close the gap between what should happen and what does.
If an inspector is coming — start with checks. Having current, timestamped records is the most immediately impactful improvement you can make. You can explain a system that is a work in progress, but you cannot explain missing records.