A regular walk around your own site picks up hazards that forms miss. SiteKey keeps a record of what you find and the actions you hand out.
A health and safety site walk is a manager, supervisor or officer walking the site, talking to the people doing the work and looking at conditions on the day.
Walks find things such as a blocked egress, a missing guard, an extension lead through a puddle or a new hire working unsupervised. They are also how the people running the business check what happens on the ground. Officers of a PCBU have a due diligence duty under section 44 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, which includes verifying that health and safety resources and processes are in place and being used. A run of recorded site walks, with findings and completed actions, is about the best evidence you can have that the duty is being met.
An unrecorded walk still finds the hazard, but it proves nothing later, and the follow-up actions stay in someone's head.
Notes on paper are meant to be typed up later and often are not. A finding from one walk is forgotten a few days later, and the hazard is still there.
A walk that ends with someone saying they will see to it fixes nothing. Each finding needs an owner and a date, or it gets dropped.
When each walk is on its own sheet of paper, you cannot see that the same hazard keeps coming back in the same place.
SiteKey keeps site walk records for each site with your sign in, inductions and incident reports.
SiteKey is a flat rate of $30 a month for an office and $50 a month for a worksite. There are no per-user fees and no per-scan costs, and the price stays the same when you take on another crew. Site walk records come with SiteKey, along with sign in, incident reporting and toolbox talks. See full pricing on the SiteKey homepage.
A site walk, also called a safety walk, walkaround or site inspection, is a structured walk through a workplace to look at conditions, talk with workers and find hazards as they are on the day. It adds a check of what is happening on site to your paperwork-based systems. On most worksites supervisors or managers do them on a regular cycle, weekly or fortnightly, plus after significant changes on site.
The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 does not prescribe site walks by name. Officers of a PCBU have a due diligence duty under section 44 that includes verifying health and safety processes are in place and being used, and a PCBU must monitor conditions to manage risks. Recorded site walks with findings and completed actions are among the strongest evidence of both. If something goes wrong, a walk with no record is hard to prove.
Record the date, who walked and what was observed. That covers hazards found and their location, photos where useful, any conversations you want on record, and positive observations. Every finding that needs fixing should become an action with an owner and a due date, and the record should show when it was closed out.
It depends on the site's risk and how fast it changes. A busy construction site changes daily and suits at least weekly walks. A stable warehouse might walk fortnightly or monthly, with extra walks after layout changes, new plant or incidents. Choose a frequency you can keep up. A weekly walk that always happens does more than a daily plan that lapses within a month.
Take your phone on the walk. Log each finding as you go with a photo and a note, assign actions to people with due dates, and close them out when they are done. SiteKey builds the walk history for each site automatically and keeps it with your sign-in records, incident reports and toolbox talks. SiteKey is a flat rate of $30 a month for an office and $50 a month for a worksite, with no per-user charges.
Find hazards on the walk and keep the record that shows you dealt with them. We will show you how it works on your site.
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