As we get fully stuck into 2024, most business-safety-related concerns tend to be around digital spaces. While we don’t want to diminish the importance of these very real threats, such as increasingly sophisticated hackers and troublesome AI-powered tools, older risks, such as water safety, haven’t gone anywhere either.
If you’re struggling to deal with the issues posed by water safety in 2024, then you’re in luck. Here, we explore some of the main points, from ascertaining responsibility to protecting your brand, covering the main bits and pieces of what you need to know.
Who is responsible?
In pretty much all cases, business owners have a legal responsibility to provide adequate drinking and cleaning water to all who spend time on their premises, under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992.
While this is a general assignment of responsibility, you may also find that you have additional responsibilities in certain contexts, such as in school and healthcare settings. Due to these different legal structures governing water safety responsibility, it’s crucial that you seek further advice to ensure compliance in your approach.
The importance of planning
As with all forms of risk management, you can’t just wing your approach. At the heart of your strategy, tying everything together will be your water safety plan. Loosely defined by the WHO as the overarching approach to risk assessment and management, your plan will be adapted to match your specific business environment, assigning core responsibilities to different individuals within the organisation. You’ll likely need assistance when creating your plan; it can have significant ramifications on the efficacy of your approach going forward, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Be proactive
The whole point of water safety strategies is that you spot issues before they actually occur. This means being strategic with your use of risk assessments, making sure that you try to spot any potential issues long before they result in an incident.
If your proactive approach is successful, you obviously won’t experience any water-safety-related issues. But that doesn’t mean that you can become complacent – the issues are kept at bay precisely because of the diligence of your approach.
Protecting your brand
People expect certain things as a bare minimum from the brands that they interact with, whether as employees or as customers. One of these basic necessities is that they’re safe when spending time on your premises.
Ensuring water safety is a critical part of that process. A single water-hygiene-related incident could have devastating effects on your brand, quite apart from the potential legal ramifications you could also end up facing.
While water safety is still absolutely a risk in 2024, we now have more measures than ever before to mitigate the range of water-related risks we face today. By implementing a well-thought-out plan that you create with the help of a water hygiene specialist, you can ensure that you’re covered against a range of important issues, both practically and legally. It’s important that you continually work on this strategy, to make sure that it accounts for new, emergent risks as and when they pop up.
