Stay on top of health and safety
Creating an honest and collaborative health and safety culture makes it easier to keep your business a safe place to work.
You can achieve this by having processes and systems in place that work for you and your staff. These don’t need to be complicated – it can be as simple as pinning key healthy and safety information on a noticeboard.
It’s normal for incidents or near misses to happen, but it’s important that your business can review and learn from them.
Always have first aid kits on hand, and workers trained to use them. You can also keep an incident register, which can be handy during a visit from WorkSafe.
Level up your online safety
Online risks can be just as damaging as offline ones, so you must identify and manage them.
How you keep your operations safe online will differ from business to business. But you should make sure you have the basics covered. For example, by using:
- complex passwords and passphrases, or even a password manager
- up-to-date software
- antivirus software
- firewall software or hardware
- two-factor authentication.
You may need to consider what extra layers of security you need, for example, encrypting sensitive data with a key, cloud service or specialised software.
Plan for emergencies
Make sure you, your staff and your business are prepared for the unexpected.
Having a plan in place for an emergency or disaster:
- is a health and safety requirement
- can help keep your people, equipment and assets safe
- will make it easier to keep your business running during and after an incident.
No business is the same and your emergency plans should reflect that. Identify potential risks relevant to your industry, location and premises – for example, how your building will withstand earthquakes.
Even if you already have an emergency plan in place, make sure you review and update it regularly.
Remember, practice makes perfect. Plan drills throughout the year so staff know what to do when emergencies happen. Use practice runs to get feedback and improve your emergency planning.
Monitor metrics to see how you are performing
Metrics and key performance indicators (or KPIs) can help you measure the success of your business or your employees.
Some of the targets you may want to measure include your:
- market share
- number and value of current customers
- revenue
- net profit and net profit margin
- utilisation rate
- net promoter score.
What's next
Starting a business
Growing your business
Dealing with tough times
Selling, closing, or stepping away
Company
Partnership
Sole trader
Contractor
Social enterprise (doing business for good)
Other business structures