Investing in RIDDOR may be a long-winded chore for some who work in health and safety but successfully following these regulations can give you some interesting business benefits that you may not have considered at first.
Standing for the (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases, and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations), RIDDOR attempts to provide workplaces with a framework for reporting incidents so that they can be logged and used to generate key information for legal and analytical purposes. It promotes a culture of safety and accountability, leading to improved incident reporting and prevention. However, when putting it against its US equivalent, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), some differences emerge.
While both systems aim to enhance workplace safety, OSHA focuses on federal regulations across the United States, addressing a wide range of occupational hazards. For instance, if you’re dealing with asbestos exposure in New Jersey, you may want to consult a New Jersey mesothelioma lawyer familiar with both state and federal asbestos-related regulations, along with OSHA guidelines, to navigate the complexities of workplace safety effectively.
Conversely, RIDDOR primarily applies to the UK and specifically includes reporting requirements for asbestos-related diseases and dangerous occurrences. Having a safe workplace is an essential component of running a business in this day and age. Being a business owner, you know that anything that will cause safety issues will come back tenfold on you and open you up to lawsuits and your business potentially shut down.
For instance, if you and your employees work in an environment where toxic chemicals are present and they are not dealt with or stored properly, then you are more than knowledgeable on what can happen if anyone is even partly exposed. Employees can file a claim, and they can check out articles such as – ‘EEOICPA Claim Process: What to Expect‘, to put their claim in motion, which could lead to you, and anyone else who runs the business, being sued.
Here we list 3 interesting benefits your business may get if you follow the legislation well.
- Better workplace compliance with health and safety
Compliance is very important in health and safety as it helps keep your business activity legal and can ensure you are protected from damaging lawsuits. This compliance does not only have legal benefits. Research has shown that organisations that are more compliant with health and safety regulations like RIDDOR are more likely to be safe places to work with fewer overall incidents. This compliance also promotes a better culture of efficiency within the organisation.
As shown, RIDDOR compliance can contribute to a wider strategy of health and safety compliance that has been shown to reduce the number of deaths, increase the quality of the workspace, and increase the amount of profit made by many companies.
- A more robust process for dealing with incidents
The greater efficiency eluded to in the last point links to usually comes in the form of a better overall process for managing health and safety. If workers know they must be compliant, they start to operate with compliance in mind.
This helps encourage workers to maintain machinery and be conscious of incidents that could occur in a workplace that would end up being RIDDOR reportable. Having a robust system in place means that if an incident does occur it is dealt with in a safe and helpful manner. In this respect, the learnings that workers get from following RIDDOR can be applied to the wider business practices.
- Staff more confident in the role of health and safety
A robust system for managing RIDDOR incidents can be learned and developed over time; and as workers learn the system, they will become more confident in their own ability to manage themselves and a team from a health and safety perspective. This can help workers feel more empowered to speak up when they witness unsafe occurrences and act on areas that could be made safer.
Educate and encourage staff to consider RIDDOR reporting in their job role If staff members are unaware of the finer points of RIDDOR or what the regulations even represent they will not be in a good position to increase the safety of the workplace and feel empowered to report incidents. This is why it is crucial that you educate staff members on the different RIDDOR reportable incidents and why it is important that if they do occur, they are reported safely and efficiently.
