Workplace risk assessment in construction: duty, method, records

The single occupational risk assessment document lists every risk your employees are exposed to, site by site and role by role. It becomes mandatory the moment you hire your first employee, under articles L4121-3 and R4121-1 of the French Labour Code. No construction business is exempt, from a lone roofer with one apprentice to a general contractor.

It is not a drawer document. The law requires it to lead to concrete prevention measures, ranked by priority. The assessment is the first building block: without it, you cannot prove you identified the hazard before the accident.

The stakes are not just administrative. After a serious accident, a missing or sloppy assessment weighs heavily in establishing the employer's 'inexcusable fault'. In a sector where falls from height still kill every year, the document protects your workers as much as your liability as a director.

Construction stacks up hazards few other sectors bring together. Falls from height come first: scaffolding, roofs, floor openings, ladders. They remain the leading cause of fatal accidents on site, and that is where any serious assessment begins.

Next come manual handling and awkward postures, the source of musculoskeletal disorders that wear bodies out early. Chemical risk is often underestimated: asbestos in renovation, crystalline silica when cutting and sanding, wood dust, solvents and adhesives. Many of these exposures are invisible and only take effect years later.

Do not forget noise, vibration, electrical risk, the movement of machinery and co-activity — several trades working on the same site at the same time. To leave nothing out, lean on the OPPBTP's sector tools and your Carsat's recommendations, which break these risk families down trade by trade.

A risk assessment that earns its keep follows a simple three-step logic. First, you break the company down into work units: by trade, by type of site or by role. This level of detail avoids the catch-all assessment that says nothing useful on the ground.

For each unit, you identify the hazards, then rate the risk by crossing two criteria: the severity of possible harm and the likelihood of exposure. This rating is not a stylistic exercise — it is what lets you prioritise. There is no point tackling everything at once: you start with the most serious and most frequent risks.

Each priority risk maps to an action, in the order of the general prevention principles: eliminate the hazard where possible, then protect collectively (guardrails, extraction at source), then equip individually (PPE), finally train and organise. Involving the workers and the works council (CSE), where one exists, changes everything: they are the ones who know the real gestures of the site.

A risk assessment is never finished. It is updated at least once a year in companies with eleven or more employees, and whenever something notable changes: a new site with a different profile, new equipment, a new procedure, or after a workplace accident. A document frozen for three years has no value, neither for prevention nor as proof.

The law of 2 August 2021 strengthened the framework. Companies with at least fifty employees translate the assessment's results into an annual prevention programme, the PAPRIPACT; smaller ones keep a list of actions recorded in the document. Above all, the assessment and its successive versions must be kept for at least 40 years, to preserve a record of exposures — decisive for delayed risks such as asbestos or silica.

In practice, the best assessment is not the thickest: it is the one that lives. Dated, shared with the teams, tied to actions that are actually followed up, and kept available to employees, the works council, the occupational doctor and the labour inspectorate, it becomes a safety steering tool rather than an annual chore.