Hi,
Last week, we covered the key pieces of legislation you need to know about when considering Health and Safety. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to look in detail at an essential tool for ensuring you stay compliant with that legislation – the risk assessment.
But before we get started, I wanted to share a few statistics with you regarding online Facilities Management learning.
You may be familiar with LinkedIn Learning, the online training platform. It’s a great tool, featuring over 18,000 courses covering a whole range of topics. But did you know that of those 18,000 courses, only 14 reference facilities management.
That means only 0.078% of courses on LinkedIn Learning cater for Facilities Managers like you. By contrast, nearly 16% of LinkedIn learning courses are focused on design, over 8% on programming, and 5.4% on marketing. That’s 205, 102 and 69 times more content for each of those topics than for Facilities Management.
Yes, I know – staring at these stats can start to induce headaches, so here’s the bottom line. Facilities Managers – like you – are phenomenally under-served when it comes to online learning and the development of skills and knowledge. A travesty really, when you consider how essential Facilities Management is to the success of an organisation.
But this is about to change.
On October 16th, we’ll be launching XenZone, an online learning platform catering exclusively for Facilities Managers – like you. It’ll be a subscription service offering unlimited access to an ever-growing library of courses, with a 100% focus on Facilities Management.
Subscriptions will be opening in October, but in the meantime, you can join the waiting list so we can keep you up to date with development and let you know as soon as the service goes live. Just click on the button below and you’ll be taken to a pre-populated form – then just click the submit button and you’ll be added to the list.
OK, now that you’ve (hopefully) joined the waiting list, it’s time to get into this week’s content!
An introduction to the risk assessment
A risk assessment is a systematic process of identifying hazards and evaluating any associated risks within a workplace, then implementing reasonable control measures to remove or reduce them.
Risk Assessments are a legal requirement under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (remember those from last week?). For any business with more than 5 employees, these must be written down.
In order to carry out a risk assessment, there are 5 steps we need to follow. We’re going to give you a brief overview of these 5 steps today, then over the coming weeks we’ll go into more detail on each of them.
Step 1 – Identify Hazards
Before we can do anything else, we need to identify potential hazards in the workplace. Once we have done this, we can assess the level of risk that these hazards present, before implementing controls to reduce this risk.
Step 2 – Assess the Level of Risk
When assessing the level of risk for each hazard, it is best practice to assign a numerical value to the hazard using the Risk Formula (Risk = Likelihood x Severity). We covered the Risk Formula back in our April newsletter (which you can read here) but don’t worry, we’ll be looking at it again in more detail as part of this series.
Step 3 – Control the Risk
Once we have assigned a value to the risk, we need to implement methods to reduce this value, and therefore reduce the risk. There are a range of methods to achieve this, some more effective than others. The effectiveness of these methods can be organised into the Risk Hierarchy, which we’ll be covering in a few weeks time.
Step 4 – Record the Results
As we mentioned above, for companies with more than 5 employees (which probably includes virtually everyone who reads these newsletters) it is a legal requirement to provide risk assessments in writing. As well as ensuring that we remain compliant, this gives us and our colleagues a written reference to ensure that recommended procedures are followed and activities are carried out safely.
Step 5 – Review the Risk Assessment
If there’s one thing that we can be sure of, it’s that things are going to change. These changes could render our risk assessment less effective or even obsolete, so it is essential that we regularly review our assessments and update them where necessary.
So that’s that – the 5 steps you need to carry out in order to carry out an effective risk assessment. We’ll be looking at each of these in more detail over the coming weeks, so by the end of this series you’ll be able to carry out a fully compliant and effective health and safety risk assessment and make sure your workplace is a safe, comfortable place to work.
Before I go, just a quick reminder – if you’d like to take your FM development to another level and get an accredited qualification to prove it, but you’re worried about the time you’ll need to commit to achieve this, we still have spaces available for our IWFM Level 4 Award Qual-in-a-Week intensive course in November. It’s one week out of the office with no distractions and all assessments carried out as you progress. You can turn up on day one and walk away on day 5 having completed all of the learning and assessment required to achieve your Level 4 Award. Sound interesting?
You can find out more and enrol here
And don’t forget to join the waiting list for the XenZone training library and stay up to date on our progress to launch.
Have a great week!
Chris and the Xenon Team
P.S. If you haven’t already studied or started studying for an IWFM qualification, which will cover topics like this in depth and fully assess your understanding, you may want to have a look at our guide to the IWFM Qualifications which will give you a full breakdown of how they work and what’s involved in the different levels. You can download it here.
P.P.S. If you’re already considering taking a qualification but don’t know which level to go for, a good starting point is our One-Minute-Leveller tool, which will ask you a few questions and give you a recommendation based on the result. You can access it here.
P.P.P.S. Don’t forget you can read all of the previous issues on our website. If you’re new to the mailing list or you want to revisit an earlier issue without digging through your inbox, you can find all of our past issues in the Vault.