Retail

Summary

Brick-and-mortar retail stores have a lot to navigate to comply with landlord retail environments, the increasing pressures placed on health and safety and, with recent events, critical incident management.

Retailers face a complex range of safety risks, including unacceptable customer behaviour, manual handling, slips, trips, falls, and working with plant and equipment. Lower profit margins compound these issues, with scarce resources for dedicated safety activities or personnel. Shifts often run on skeleton crews with minimal supervision, and during the busiest times, stores may be operated by part-time or casual and often first-time employees under pressure, sometimes leading to shortcuts to get the job done.

Training a mixture of full-time, part-time, and casual staff to maintain safety standards presents a significant challenge. Efforts to maximise the selling floor often result in tiny back-of-house areas with unsafe material storage and handling. Adding to this mix are in-store customers, demonstrators, contractors, and visitors, which multiply the risks. High customer incident rates can lead to expensive insurance costs, further straining resources.

Shared Safety & Risk understands these unique challenges and provides tailored solutions to help our retail clients navigate the complex health and safety landscape, ensuring a safer environment for employees and customers alike.

How can we assist?

We develop practical and bespoke health and safety processes emphasised by instruction and coaching for key internal stakeholders to manage and report on key safety and well-being risks.