This afternoon finds us helping a few of our customers prep their annual reports and generally discussing annual review.
As always this prompts us to look at the UK and encourage incorporating national trends and learnings into reviews and plans for the upcoming year. Whilst its always best to target your work and tailor your plan to your specific needs, its also good to learn from other industries and sectors. Looking at trends, using key information to identify any gaps or actions needed to bolster any current control measures.
The HSE have kindly, as always, released the statistics in a super easy to use summary, have a look and see whether there is anything you can learn from – it can’t hurt right? http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1718.pdf
So why complete an annual Review or Report?
Learning, embracing and improving - think back to plan, do, check, act.
Businesses know their systems and their activities. They’ve done their planning, they are doing their doing and it’s all going well. It’s at this stage that it’s important to take stock and reflect - check and Act. All too often, we become so busy with the day to day running we may miss weaknesses or gaps that need addressing. As part of the annual review, reflect on your plan, your doing and then act accordingly. Remember – even small businesses can benefit from some reflection time! It can be completely informal. Its about whatever works for you.
When reviewing think about:
Reviewing your performance
Make sure that your plan has been implemented – don’t just think documentation. Gain feedback from all different levels of the business. Who knows better than your employees, committee members or audit teams.
Think about how your projects, sale or general operations delivered for the year? Have you seen some bumps, or has it all been smooth?
Have your audits or inspections uncovered issues or lots of best practice? Are you reaching legal compliance? think about and review how well the main risks are being controlled and if you are achieving your aims. If you feel like its failing in places, can you pin point anything - it may be hard but think about whether this is because of the system you have, behaviours or management?
Use your investigations. Hopefully you investigate the causes of significant accidents, incidents or near misses – look at what has occurred, and try to learn, are there trends? What could your business do in 2019/20 to change things.
Act
Learn from the accidents and incidents, ill-health data, errors and relevant experience of other businesses. No one is perfect, so make use of all relevant and comparable stories.
Revisit plans, policy documents and risk assessments to see if they need updating, if they don’t, then brilliant! If they do, set your company SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time) based targets.
We always find this review and level of honesty with yourselves will help you flourish. Remember that even well designed and established systems sometimes need tweaks.
And remember, it doesnt need to be long and arduous - break it down. Make it work for you. No one is expecting a small business to produce a lengthy review document, just be sure that you have reflected, know the issues (if there are any) and what you will be doing going forward.
