Decluttering a safety management system is an important task that can help ensure that your organisation effectively manages risks and keeps employees safe. A cluttered and disorganised safety management system can be confusing, hard to navigate, and even create additional risks if important information is not easily accessible. In this blog post, we'll discuss the steps you can take to declutter your safety management system and keep it organised, up-to-date, and effective.

The past principles and practices of safety management have served us really well and they will continue to do so particularly for simple tasks where individuals or small groups are carrying out things where the risks are well-known and not much is changing in the environment.

However, what happens when a procedure doesn't fit the situation?

What happens if something unexpected strikes and there's no rule to cover the situation?

What happens if we chose to go outside the procedure to get things done?

Experts agree that improved safety contributes to profitability in many ways. Costly incidents are avoided. Employees naturally become more emotionally and physically invested in their work. Workforce turnover goes down, while productivity and quality go up.

For someone running a small to medium sized business the letters SMS, standing for safety management system can be a forbidding acronym. The SMS for a large and complex organisation can be a document of many thousands of words over hundreds of pages, prescribing a bewildering array of meetings and procedures. But the power of SMS as a concept means it is scalable. A small organisation can reap safety and business benefits from a much simpler SMS. All you have to do is stick to it.