How to improve your restaurant health and safety

What are the restaurant health and safety requirements?

Compliance has always played a significant role in the success of a restaurant. All venues in the UK are legally required to document proper risk assessments and the operational compliance neccesary to pass audits and inspections. Failure to do so not only impacts reputation - it has serious financial and legal implications too.

This is detailed in the health and safety work act and applies to all catering and food premises no matter the size. As a restaurant owner you have the responsibility to take out the necessary procedures detailed in the 5 steps to health and safety compliance to ensure the safety of your guests and staff to prevent injury or illness.

To summarise, you must cover these basic areas to remain compliant with the health and safety work act.

• Risk assessments
• Staff policies
• Kitchen safety
• Food safety
• Equipment maintenance

Compliance software: Solution to health and safety

If you run single or multiple venues, compliance isn't anything new to you. Risk assessments, policies and general health and safety are an integral part of running a venue even if they are not the most exciting.

Compliance management has always been a notoriously slow and inefficient process that is difficult to manage and keep track of, especially across multiple venues. That's where compliance software comes in.

Through It's various tools it can make managing compliance a much smoother process that doesn't leave you scratching your head.

Risk assessment template

Creating risk assessments using compliance software is simple and easy. Using one template you can quickly put together all your risk assessments and share them across all venues with a push of a button.

Then it's up to your sites to complete, but that's not where the benefit ends. In most businesses, once you have printed all your risk assessments and sent it to your venues that's where your involvement ends. You have no way of tracking their completion and making sure they done properly.

Luckily compliance software can solve this disconnect. With online risk assessments you can set deadlines and monitor completion which can help raise compliance standards. This gives managers and BDMs more ownership of their tasks, highlighting when things don't get done, without the need for regular audits and venue visits.

Online policies

Policies are an important part of any business. They are the guidelines you give staff to uphold your brand identity and the rules they need to follow to ensure a safer work environment. Online policies make familiarising new starters with a proper code of conduct more easily. Simply set a task for policy review and it will be added to their to do list which means new starters can get to work quicker.

However, the real advantage of online policies is mass management. All policies are stored in one place and accessible to all venues to review at any time. You can even set policies to be reviewed again to maintain a higher standard of service or add additional policies to better prepare for certain events.

Clear reporting

With a compliance management system like Hopsy you can run your whole business from one place. There's no need for audits and regular venue visits which can be costly and time consuming. You can view how your entire business is doing at a glance or, drill down to see individual venue performance if needed.

This is all scored within Hopsy which lets you monitor your overall compliance and daily activity through dashboards which give you all of the data you couldn't get without visiting your venues everyday. This data can help inform your decisions moving forward as you can clearly identify areas that need improvement.

Compliance checklists

To help maintain compliance throughout your business we offer daily, weekly and monthly health and safety compliance checklists which can help maintain a good standard of compliance throughout your daily operations.

Learn more about our solution to compliance management or try our compliance software for free today!