Workplace Safeguarding

for employers, employees, and apprentices

Safeguarding Governance for the commercial workplace

Many organisations are now recognising that safeguarding extends beyond traditional sectors and has an important role to play in creating safe, supportive, and inclusive workplaces.

RLB supports organisations and commercial businesses to develop effective workplace safeguarding and wellbeing arrangements, including:

Mental Health and Wellbeing strategies and Mental Health First Aid initiatives.
Anti-bullying, anti-harassment, and anti-discrimination policies and frameworks.
Workplace safeguarding strategies to protect employees, apprentices, volunteers, and service users.
Safeguarding awareness training for customer-facing teams, operational staff, and contact centre colleagues.
Sexual harassment prevention policies, risk assessments, investigations, and training.
Drug and alcohol policies, procedures, and workforce education programmes.
Domestic abuse and the workplace policies, procedures and support mechanisms.
Crisis response planning, including support pathways for colleagues experiencing abuse, exploitation, self-harm, suicidal ideation, or significant welfare concerns.
Developing clear guidance for managers and employees to recognise risk, respond appropriately, and access support services when needed.

Understanding how far an organisation's duty of care extends can be complex. Employers are often faced with situations where legal requirements, ethical considerations, risk management, and employee wellbeing overlap. Knowing what is proportionate, appropriate, and in the best interests of those involved is not always straightforward.

At RLB, we help organisations navigate these challenges with confidence. Our approach focuses on creating cultures of openness, accountability, and psychological safety, ensuring that people feel supported, empowered, and able to seek help when they need it.

While organisations may not require an in-house safeguarding specialist, they do need clear procedures, effective governance, and a workforce that understands how to respond to concerns. Through consultancy, training, supervision, and strategic support, we help employers build the knowledge, confidence, and systems needed to protect people and fulfil their duty of care.

When safeguarding children and young people, particularly apprentices and learners, organisations often have clearer pathways for identifying concerns, seeking advice, and making referrals to specialist services. While every situation requires a proportionate and individualised response, there is generally a well-established understanding of safeguarding responsibilities and support mechanisms.

Workplace safeguarding can be more complex. As organisations increasingly invest in psychological safety, wellbeing strategies, Mental Health First Aid programmes, and employee support initiatives, there is a growing need to ensure robust safeguarding governance sits alongside these developments.

Without clear safeguarding frameworks, organisations can face significant risks. These may include missed opportunities to support individuals experiencing abuse or exploitation, inadequate responses to suicide risk and mental health crises, insufficient support for colleagues providing wellbeing support to others, unclear decision-making, gaps in training and supervision, and potential legal, regulatory, or reputational consequences.

Many organisations now provide valuable wellbeing support through Employee Assistance Programmes, counselling services, GP access, financial wellbeing support, and other employee benefits. However, the organisations that achieve the greatest impact understand that wellbeing and safeguarding must work hand in hand. They invest in long-term cultural change, clear safeguarding policies and procedures, effective governance arrangements, and workforce training that equips people to recognise risk and respond appropriately.

At RLB, we have supported organisations across a range of sectors to develop workplace safeguarding frameworks, governance arrangements, policies, reporting pathways, training programmes, supervision models, and quality assurance processes. Our approach helps organisations move beyond compliance and create safer, more confident workplaces where people feel supported, protected, and empowered to seek help when they need it.

We have successfully worked with many departments and job roles across sectors such as education, construction, engineering, HR support, housing, energy, water, and gas utilities, private medical and healthcare, leisure, tourism, and hospitality, manufacturing, wholesale and retail Trade, national park authorities, logistics, freight, rail, air, and warehouse operations, hotels, restaurants, pubs, and catering, broadcasting, telecommunications, publishing, and IT services, banking, insurance, accountancy, investment funds, and commercial property, management consulting, legal services, office administration, call centres, security, cleaning services, armed forces, government, security, hospitals, care facilities, arts providers, events, spectator sports, museums, and country clubs.

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Our Approach

RLB can support your organisation using a three phased approach to understand the current policies, procedures, and initiatives that support employee wellbeing and then bring this into operational and strategic safe practices.

Our approach includes:

Phase 1- Creating a bespoke policy and procedure and governance structure that underpins employee wellbeing, safeguarding, and the risk of suicide or crisis.

Phase 2- To deliver bespoke awareness training at different levels throughout the organisation to promote understanding of safeguarding, support, and crisis management.

Phase 3- To ensure that the safeguarding strategy is effective and to identify any further opportunities to embed and promote wellbeing and safety for all.