Planning and managing your company events involves shouldering a significant burden—you have prime responsibility for ensuring overall health and safety. That means you are inevitably culpable for any event-related health and safety failings. Avoid buckling under the pressure by following some easy-to-adopt guidance.
Before you start planning, you should set realistic limits. Decide on an appropriate level of planning detail that matches the event’s scale and degree of risk. Establishing such limits early on helps you avoid overlooking important health and safety hazards or bogging yourself down in unimportant minutiae.
After imposing these boundaries, choose a dedicated team to assist with your various duties. Assess your strengths and weaknesses and cherry-pick a team that can provide support in the areas where you feel weakest. Defer to your organisation’s health and safety policy for help assigning health and safety responsibilities to your teammates. Most organisations always assign certain positions the same health and safety responsibilities to ensure consistency.
Only after everyone in your team understands their duties can you begin writing one of the event’s most important documents: the safety plan. Your event safety plan should identify what resources and facilities you will need to satisfy health and safety regulations. Safety plans work using the logic of ‘risk assessments’, or assessing the workspace and work-related activities in an effort to identify and prevent all risks associated with your event. To write your event’s safety plan, you will need the following information:
• The scale, type and scope of the event
• The type and size of the audience
• The event’s location and duration
• The time of day and year the event will be held
Event planning can be a massive undertaking. Rely on Bollington Risk Management to help bear some of your burden with our expertise and extensive resources.
