A quick guide to help you produce clear concise Safe Working Instructions for the more hazardous activities that your employees undertake

There is a legal requirement on employers to provide employees and others instructions on how to undertake work safely. You may decide it is best to have a set of unwritten rules but this is unlikely to suffice in discharging your obligations, and would certainly leave you severely exposed should things go terribly wrong.

It is good practice therefore to produce a set of Safe Working Instructions (SWI) to formalise the arrangements, you the employer wish to impose, to safeguard people from harm.

The key is to produce a set of concise and relevant instructions. You therefore need to break down the instructions into sections that will be relevant to a particular target audience. For example, there is no point have detailed instructions for machine operators on how to use Machine X mixed in with instructions that would only be applicable to secretarial staff.

Once you've identified the scope of the SWI activity, you need to identify whether you want to break down the individual instructions into further sub-headings. For example an activity might constitute a number of sub activities/tasks where the hazards and controls differ. In these cases it will make the SWI more concise if you break down the instructions into sub-activities and tasks.

Now identify the mandatory and prohibited actions, or the "Dos and the Don'ts". The key here is to define the appropriate level of detail. Where possible keep the instructions as general as possible to meet the safety objective. The more prescriptive you make the rules, the less flexibility your employees have in finding better and possibly safer methods of work. There may be occasions however, particularly with very safety critical operations, where very precise rules need to be set.

You may find some instructions are repeated from one SWI to another e.g. Do not eat, drink or smoke except in designated areas. In these cases consider whether it can be included on a General SWI, and then reference compliance with the General SWI as part of the Work Instruction – this may avoid a lot of duplication.

Once you've drafted the SWI consult with the staff that will need to comply with these requirements. This will determine whether the requirements you intend to impose are practicable, and also hopefully will improve their safety awareness and their buy-in into your safety arrangements.

Once their views have been considered, issue the SWI and communicate the requirements to those applicable. You may wish to record this in your training records by obtaining a signed statement from each employee that he/she has read and understood the requirements.