The beauty of events is that they change, moving with the times and developing through the years. If your event is to be a resounding success, you must also ensure how you manage safety changes by striving for continual improvement.

Safety should be addressed at the senior management level, starting at the design/concept stages of your event and should be routinely considered throughout. It is not a standalone topic, and several factors will have a ripple effect, so the larger the project, the more care, thought, and expertise is required.

Whether it is ensuring that you have issued scopes of works to your contractors prior to quotation or ensuring that you have evidence of their competence prior to issuing a contract, there are key touch points throughout the event planning phases which should be ticked off.

Running a successful event involves teamwork, and your safety advisor should be regarded as a key project team member – making the most of their knowledge and expertise from the outset.

In order to help you achieve this, you could try the following:

  • Have a centralised risk register that all of the management team can contribute to so that all of the reasonably foreseeable significant hazards are identified across the team, as everyone has different experiences and knowledge to draw on
  • Once you have agreed on the risk register and written the first draft of your risk assessment, make sure that you identify who is responsible for the control measures and the timeframes in which they are to be completed
  • Use this event risk assessment as part of the checklist for running the event – creating standalone checklists if needed, ensuring that the risk assessment does not become an inactive document
  • Review event risk assessments throughout the event life cycle to ensure that what has been specified is being implemented, or otherwise, the risk assessment is updated accordingly

Finally, you should commit time and energy to monitoring and reviewing the effectiveness of your control measures and reviewing this post-event at the senior level so that your approach can be varied for the next event. This influences the corporate memory and is key to ensuring colleagues learn from your successes and failures – and vice versa.

Over time, the cumulative effect of these small improvements will have a positive and meaningful effect on the success of your events.