A site manager once handed me a 47-page risk assessment.
Proud as anything.
I asked him if he'd read it.
He had not.
I asked him if the guys on the tools had seen it.
"They signed it."
I asked what they thought the three biggest risks on the job were.
He went to get them. They gave three completely different answers to each other — and none of them matched anything in the 47 pages.
A risk assessment that nobody has read isn't a safety document. It's a liability document. Written to protect the business if something goes wrong, not to stop something going wrong.
The best risk assessment I've ever seen was two pages, written by the team doing the job, with actual photos of the site. Nobody needed to sign it. They'd written it.
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