Risk assessment: stop rewriting it the week before the inspection

A labour inspector is at the door. They ask for your risk assessment. You find the file: last modified 14 months ago. The risks it lists no longer match the shop floor. The prevention actions? Nobody knows which ones were carried out.

The scenario is an ordinary one. Not because smaller companies do not care, but because the document is treated as an administrative formality rather than a working tool.

What the law says, on both sides of the border

In France, the Document unique d'évaluation des risques professionnels (DUERP) is compulsory from the first employee. It has to be updated at least once a year in companies of 11 employees or more, and at every significant change — new equipment, reorganisation, accident. Since the 2021 occupational health act, its successive versions have to be kept for 40 years.

In Belgium, the logic is the same under another name: risk analysis, a five-year Global Prevention Plan (PGP) and an Annual Action Plan (PAA), set out in the Code du bien-être au travail.

In both cases the spirit is identical: identify, assess, act, follow up. Continuously.

The real problem: the document as a snapshot

Most risk assessments are a photograph taken once a year. Between two photographs:

• an operator mentions a risk out loud, and nobody writes it down;
• a prevention action is carried out, but never recorded;
• a new machine arrives, and the assessment does not follow.

The result: on inspection day you are not necessarily non-compliant. You are simply unable to prove otherwise.

From a document to a process

A living risk assessment rests on four habits:

1. Report from the floor. A risk is raised from the workshop, on a phone, at the moment somebody sees it — not three months later in a meeting.
2. Score it consistently. Severity × likelihood, with the same grid for everyone. Otherwise every manager has their own scale.
3. Tie every risk to an action. An action has an owner, a due date and a status. A risk with no action is an observation, not prevention.
4. Generate the document, do not write it. The assessment or the action plan comes out of the system up to date, in one click, with its version history.

What it changes in practice

The document stops being a year-end exercise. It becomes the instant snapshot of work done all year long. On inspection day you show the report, the history and the closed actions. That is all.

How Klaro Cards goes about it

Klaro Cards' Occupational risk assessment module covers both the French and the Belgian regulations (see also the HR & internal organisation modules). Risks are reported from the shop floor, including offline on a phone, scored, then attached to prevention actions followed over time. The assessment and the action plan generate themselves, with complete traceability. The module can be taken on its own, from €25 per user per month.