Safety policies, procedures, registers, checklists, safety data sheets, training records and other safety documents are all part of your safety management system.

If you have a policy and procedures manual (PPM) that does nothing but sit on a shelf collecting dust then you are missing your opportunity to properly communicate your safety culture to your staff.  You are also disadvantaged when it comes to keeping your documents up to date.

Making your PPM and other safety documents freely and readily available to your staff and to others, for example other businesses that you want to work with, is the only thing that makes sense.  This can be done by implementing some simple document control strategies such as making sure that there is only ever one master copy of each document, stored in the cloud, and shared with relevant permissions to stakeholders.

Staff, business associates, and even inspectors can log into your safety system and view your current, live, controlled documents.  You should maintain complete control over who has access to view your policy docuements.  Only authorsied staff should have write access to these critical, legally enforceable documents.

Confidential files such as incident reports must be safely stored in an admin area that is not visible to general users and only accessible by managerial staff.