Risk Assessments

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer is required to carry out suitable and sufficient risk assessments for the health and safety risks their employees face at work. If your business has five or more employees, you must record the significant findings of those assessments in writing. Shinepoint gives you a structured way to create, manage, and track risk assessments - with pre-built templates covering the most common workplace hazards and a clear workflow for assigning assessments to employees and collecting their sign-off.

#Risk Assessment Templates

Getting started with risk assessments doesn't mean starting from a blank page. Shinepoint includes 14 professionally structured templates covering the hazards most commonly encountered across UK workplaces. Each template comes with pre-defined sections, identified hazards, and suggested control measures - giving you a solid foundation to build on rather than having to research and draft everything yourself.

The full template library includes:

• Office DSE Assessment - workstation setup, environmental factors, and screen use practices
• Working from Home Assessment - home workspace ergonomics and remote working considerations
• Manual Handling Assessment - lifting, carrying, pushing, and pulling tasks
• Moving and Handling People Assessment - for care and support roles involving person handling
• Fire Risk Assessment - fire hazards, evacuation procedures, and emergency preparedness
• Working at Height Assessment - risks associated with working above ground level
• Scaffolding Safety Assessment - scaffold erection, use, and dismantling
• COSHH Assessment - Control of Substances Hazardous to Health, covering chemical and substance exposure
• Lone Working Risk Assessment - risks specific to employees who work alone or in isolation
• Food Preparation Hygiene Assessment - food handling, contamination prevention, and kitchen safety
• Slip, Trip and Fall Assessment - flooring, housekeeping, and environmental slip hazards
• Violence and Aggression Assessment - risks from confrontational situations in customer-facing or care roles
• Property Viewing Risk Assessment - safety considerations for estate agents conducting property viewings
• Workplace Risk Assessment - a general template covering broad workplace hazards

Templates are tagged to specific sectors and employee roles, so the ones most relevant to your business appear first. You can use any template as a starting point, then adjust the hazards, controls, and risk levels to reflect your actual working conditions. Templates marked as Recommended are particularly relevant to your industry and are a good place to begin.

#Creating Risk Assessments

You can create a new risk assessment either by selecting a template from the template library or by starting with a blank assessment. If you choose a template, the form will be pre-populated with sections, hazards, and suggested controls that you can edit freely. Starting from scratch gives you an empty form with a single section and hazard ready to fill in.

Every risk assessment is built around a clear structure. Assessments are divided into sections, and each section contains one or more hazards. For each hazard, you'll record:

• Hazard description - what the hazard is and where it occurs
• Who is at risk - which employees, visitors, or contractors could be affected
• Existing controls - the measures already in place to manage the risk
• Risk level - your assessment of the current risk, rated as Low, Medium, High, or Very High
• Additional controls - any further actions needed to reduce the risk
• Residual risk level - the expected risk level once additional controls are implemented

You can add as many sections and hazards as you need, reorder them, duplicate sections to save time, and collapse sections you've finished working on to keep the form manageable.

When you first create an assessment, you'll set its status to either Draft or Active. Use Draft whilst you're still working on the content - it won't be visible for assignment until you move it to Active. The full set of statuses an assessment moves through is:

• Draft - work in progress, not yet ready for distribution
• Active - finalised and available for employee assignment
• Review Due - the assessment's review date has passed and it needs revisiting
• Archived - no longer in use, but preserved for your records

#Assigning Risk Assessments to Employees

Once an assessment is active, you can assign it to employees from the assessment's detail page using the Assign Employees button. You'll see a list of your employees and can select the individuals who need to read and acknowledge the assessment. This is particularly useful when certain assessments only apply to specific roles or departments - a COSHH assessment, for example, might only need to go to your site workers, not your office staff.

Employee sign-off on risk assessments serves an important purpose. It creates a documented record that each person has read and understood the hazards relevant to their work and the controls in place to protect them. This evidence can be essential during Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspections, insurance claims, or if an incident occurs.

From the assessment's detail page, you can track sign-off progress at a glance. A progress bar shows how many assigned employees have signed off, with a full breakdown listing each employee, their department, the date they were assigned, and whether they've acknowledged or are still pending. Sign-off rates feed directly into your overall compliance score on the Dashboard, so keeping them high has a tangible impact on your compliance posture.

#In the Employee Portal

Employees see their assigned risk assessments in the Employee Portal. They can read the full assessment - including all hazards, risk levels, and control measures - at their own pace. When they're ready, they confirm that they've read and understood the assessment by ticking a confirmation box and providing their e-signature. Once signed off, the assessment is marked as complete in their portal and the date is recorded against their name.

#Reviewing and Updating Assessments

Risk assessments aren't documents you create once and forget about. Circumstances change - new equipment is introduced, work processes evolve, staff move into different roles, or an incident highlights a hazard you hadn't previously considered. Regular reviews ensure your assessments remain accurate and your controls remain effective.

When creating or editing an assessment, you can set a review date to remind yourself when it's next due for review. As that date approaches, the assessment's status will move to Review Due, making it easy to see which assessments need your attention. From the Dashboard, you can monitor upcoming reviews alongside your other compliance metrics.

When reviewing an assessment, consider whether the hazards are still relevant, whether any new hazards have emerged, whether the existing controls are working as intended, and whether the risk levels need adjusting. If changes are needed, edit the assessment to reflect the current situation. Once you're satisfied, set the status back to Active and update the review date.

If an assessment is no longer relevant - perhaps because a work activity has ceased or been replaced by a different process - you can archive it. Archiving removes it from active use but preserves the full record, including all employee sign-off history, for future reference.

#Risk Assessments and Compliance

Risk assessment management is a key component of your overall compliance score on the Dashboard. The score takes into account how many assessments you have in place, whether they're current and actively reviewed, and what proportion of your Employees have signed off on the assessments assigned to them.

Building a strong risk assessment foundation starts with adopting the templates relevant to your sector, tailoring them to your specific workplace, assigning them to the right employees, and keeping them under regular review. Combined with your Policies and incident management, a well-maintained set of risk assessments demonstrates to regulators, insurers, and your own team that you take health and safety seriously - and that you have the evidence to prove it.