Repetitions: For and against
Everyone knows the repetition effect of advertising: by repeating the core message and the brand, the message eventually reaches the subconscious.
This effect can also be used – for important aspects – in the risk assessment, but at the same time it should be used very sparingly.
If, for example, a risk assessment is created for office workplaces, it is right to ask whether information on the safe use of stairs and handrails is in the right place. Repetitions, as in this example, can then distract from the essentials and the risk assessment becomes unnecessarily long.
Focus on the essentials
This leads to an important insight: a risk assessment should consistently focus on its topic. This keeps it lean, clear and easier to revise if there is reason to make changes in the future.
At the same time, the reader of such a risk assessment knows immediately what it is about and saves reading content that otherwise has nothing to do with the specific activity or the specific work equipment.
Risk assessments for general topics
Generalization removes generally valid content that should (actually) be present in every risk assessment. This could be, for example:
- Lighting
- Organization of first aid
- Traffic routes
- …
These topics are each dealt with in a separate risk assessment with the corresponding measures and responsibilities. Outsourcing also makes it easier to track measures, as the measures and their completion only need to be tracked in one document.
Furthermore, these topics are no longer regularly addressed in the other risk assessments – unless special aspects are to be considered in a special risk assessment.
Documentation
A framework document describes, among other things, which concepts are used to prepare the risk assessments and how these concepts work.
This framework document therefore sets out which general (= generalized) risk assessments have been prepared for the company and to which areas of the company they apply.
Outlook
In addition to the concept of generalization, there are other concepts for creating the risk assessment. What they all have in common is that the application of the concepts avoids redundancy and thus increases maintainability.
The next blog in this series will deal with the specialization of risk assessments and thus with the concept of “co-applicable risk assessments”.
