Whatever the size of your organisation, health and safety in the workplace is an important issue. The latest health a safety statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive show that British businesses lost more than 30 million working days in 2017/18 due to work-related illness and injuries. In 2016/17, injuries and ill health caused by working conditions are estimated to have cost £15 billion.

These eight steps serve as a health and safety blueprint that will help your company to avoid the loss of productivity and extra cost burden caused by work-related accidents, injuries and illness.

1.      Create a workplace health and safety plan

You’ll need to identify health and safety hazards and put polices and procedures in place to eliminate or reduce risks. The first step is to create an effective H&S plan, and ensure that you involve your employees. This will make sure that they understand you take their health and safety seriously and get them taking their own health and safety equally seriously.

2.      Ensure leadership

Appoint someone to lead health and safety in your company. To make it plain how important you consider H&S to be, planning and execution must be sponsored from the top. It should be visible and spoken about, with policies and practices set and performance monitored.

In smaller companies, a documented health and safety system may not be necessary. However, the actions of the business owner or senior managers should set good examples for staff to follow. In larger companies, the need to document policies and procedures is more important (and a legal requirement). Health and safety leaders will need to ensure that these policies and procedures are reviewed regularly.

3.      Carry out a health and safety audit and risk assessments

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. In the field of health and safety, this means that you must have an independent workplace health and safety audit. This will help you to determine the H&S hazards and risks in your business and if your existing policies and practices are safe and legal.

Risk assessments will aid you in identifying the level of risk of individual hazards and what actions you may need to take to eliminate or reduce those risks.

4.      Ensure Competence

From leadership, through management, and on to individual responsibility for health and safety, a company should ensure competence to undertake responsibilities. This means the people who lead the health and safety effort should have the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to do so.

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR), a company must appoint at least one competent person to help it comply with its legal requirements toward health and safety. In many cases, this may mean employing an external specialist or consultant.

5.      Train employees in health and safety

Just as you would train employees to do their job effectively, employees should be trained in health and safety pertinent to their roles. You may need to produce written policies and procedures, and make them available to your employees. Training may be provided in groups or by individual coaching, and employees will need to be supervised until competency has been assessed and confirmed. Employees should sign off to confirm that they have received health and safety training and understand what is required of them.

Remember that if correct training is not provided, you may be endangering your employees’ lives and your business.

6.      Make health and safety an everyday conversation

Put health and safety on the agenda at team meetings, one-to-ones and on your company newsletter, and create KPIs that promote health and safety in the workplace. Seek feedback, and encourage employees to share their views and ideas – you’ll be surprised how employee engagement can create impetus for identifying hazards and doing things more safely.

7.      Investigate health and safety incidents

If an incident does occur, irrespective of whether it causes injury, investigate it to find out what happened and why. This will enable you to take the actions needed to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. It may be that a hazard needs risk management revisiting, or an individual or team needs extra health and safety training. Whatever the outcome, a policy of investigating every incident will help to reinforce your commitment to improving workplace health and safety.

8.      Keep records

Keep records of all incidents, inspections, risk assessments, workplace health and safety audits, training provided, etc, etc.

Make safety a key business objective

Health and safety should not be an afterthought in any company. If you are not working to keep your employees safe from harm, you are putting them at risk and threatening the success of your business. Your employees are your most valuable resource. A commitment to their health and safety in your workplace will show that you understand this.

Ensure your company is admired for being a conscientious employer who puts the wellbeing of its employees at the top of its agenda. To learn how we can help you achieve all this with a health and safety blueprint, contact Integral Safety Management today.

Health and safety statistics published in October 2018 showed that there is still plenty to do to make workplaces safer in the UK. While the numbers of accidents and fatalities continue to fall, they still don’t make pleasant reading. Here’s a snapshot of the figures for 2017/18:

• 555,000 injuries occurred at work according to the Labour Force Survey
• 71,062 injuries to employees reported under RIDDOR
• 144 workers killed at work

In addition, 1.4 million people suffered from a work-related illness. Because of work-related illness and injury, almost 31 million work days were lost. In 2016/17, it was estimated that work-related illness and injury cost British business £15 billion. Put another way, poor health and safety at work costs British business almost twice the UK’s EU payments each year.

In this article, you’ll learn four ways to make a workplace safer.

1.      Conduct a health and safety audit in the workplace

Health and safety laws, rules, regulations and best practices evolve over time. What may have helped to keep your employees healthy and safe two or three years ago may be poor practice today. A health and safety audit in the workplace is essential to appraise your current procedures and processes and ensure they are fit for purpose and legal.

Your health and safety audit must be conducted by a competent person with the knowledge, skills and experience to do so – and they must not be one of your employees or otherwise associated with your organisation. This independence ensures a non-biased audit.

(Read more in our article “What is a health and safety audit in the workplace?”)

2.      Make sure your employees understand the most common workplace hazards

No workplace can be hazard free, but making certain that your employees understand the most common hazards and how to reduce the risks of accident and injury will help to reduce the number of days lost and associated costs. The main hazards are:

• Slips, trips and falls
• Electrocution
• ‘Caught-in’ hazards
• ‘Struck-by’ hazards

Get your employees actively involved in their own health and safety. Ask them to consider what hazards and risks there are, and have them think about how to reduce those risks.

Start the ball rolling by sending your employees a link to our article “How to protect your employees from general workplace hazards” and discussing their thoughts at your next team meeting.

3.      Carry out an HSE risk assessment

An HSE risk assessment will help you to analyse your workplace and working practices, so that you identify the risks and put in place the controls needed to minimise these risks and reduce loss, damage, or injury. There are five steps to making an effective HSE risk assessment:

1. Identify the hazards
2. Decide who is at risk

• Evaluate those risks and produce precautions

1. Record significant findings
2. Review and update

A tip here is to use an HSE risk assessment template to make sure that you cover everything needed.

(Learn more and discover an easy way to carry out an HSE risk assessment by reading this simple guide to an HSE risk assessment.)

4.      Create a culture of health and safety in your workplace

Above all else, it is essential to create a culture of health and safety in your workplace. Let your employees know that your organisation puts the health and safety of them above profit. There are a few strategies you can employ to change your workplace culture and get people thinking more about health and safety. For example:

• Ensure that H&S training is conducted at induction and then updated regularly
• Reward employees for safe behaviour and good H&S ideas that make the workplace safer
• Partner with an H&S expert to provide independent training and conduct H&S audits and risk assessments
• Ensure signage draws attention to hazards, risks and required procedures
• Put H&S on the agenda of every team meeting

Health and safety is everyone’s responsibility

If you create the right culture within your organisation, then everyone will start to take responsibility for health and safety. Your employees will become part of a workplace coalition that improves wellbeing in the workplace, reducing accidents and injuries, and cuts the cost of workplace illness and injury. Your organisation will become a more productive, happier place to work. And your organisation will be doing its bit to drive health and safety in the right direction in the UK.

Ensure your company is admired for being a conscious employer that puts the wellbeing of its employees at the top of its agenda. To learn how we can help you achieve all this, contact Integral Safety Management today.

Wherever people work, there is a danger of accidents. Many of the injuries and fatalities that happen in UK workplaces could be avoided, if only more consideration was given to potential risks in the workplace. Perhaps the real problem is that where work done is ‘run-of-the-mill’, employers, employees, and contractors pay less attention to risk. Consequently, many workplace accidents are caused by general workplace hazards.

In this article, we’ll discuss what these general workplace hazards are, and how you can reduce the risk from them in your workplace.

Slips, trips, and falls hazards

The single biggest cause of injury at work – slips, trips, and falls were responsible for a colossal 609,000 non-fatal injuries at work in 2017. They cost UK employers more than £1 billion every year. Here are five things to do now to immediately reduce the risk of slips, trips, and falls in your workplace:

1. Keep surfaces dry
2. Keep walkways and corridors free of obstacles

• Ensure that stairs, ramps, walkways, and loading and unloading areas are adequately lit

1. Make certain that employees wear effective footwear
2. Control movement – e.g. stop people running, taking shortcuts

Learn more accident prevention tips in our article “10 tips to prevent slips, trips and falls in the workplace”.

Electrocution hazards

There aren’t many workplaces where electrocution is a real hazard. Whether it is the computer on your desk, or the kettle in the staff canteen, your workplace is an environment where an electrical accident may be lurking around the corner. About 30 electrocutions in the workplace result in death each year in the UK. Hundreds more cause burns and permanent injury. How can you prevent the same happening in your workplace?

• Comply with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989
• Ensure your electrical equipment is serviced by qualified electricians regularly
• Always switch off electrical equipment when cleaning it
• Never mix water with electricity – keep work surfaces dry
• Tran your employees in the safe use f electrical equipment

‘Caught-in’ hazards

This is a bit of a catch-all phrase. Caught-ins include getting caught in:

• Unguarded machinery
• Buried in excavations
• Caught between machinery

These simple actins will help to protect your employees from caught-ins:

• Ensure machinery is equipped with protective guards
• Ensure that workers work at a safe distance from moving equipment, and never place themselves between moving structures, machinery, or vehicles
• Ensure that all loads are properly secured
• Never work in unprotected trenches that are more than five feet deep, and always use a ladder to exit a trench
• Insist that workers wear personal protective equipment where necessary

Struck-by hazards

‘Struck-by’ hazards are also a major cause of workplace accidents, especially on construction sites, where there are heightened risks of being struck by:

• Heavy equipment, trucks, and cranes
• Flying (or falling) objects
• Walls that are under construction

Actions you can take to prevent such accidents include:

• Ensuring that all vehicles are well maintained and regularly checked
• Ensuring that employees are clear of site when lifting or dumping
• Ensure that all drivers and operators are qualified for the job they are doing
• Inspect tools, cranes, and hoists
• Keep materials stored away from edges and openings
• Train employees to use tools
• Insist that all employees wear prescribed personal protective equipment
• Store all tools securely
• Never overload machinery, lifting devices, and vehicles
• Always ensure that employees ‘buddy-up’ whenever possible

How do you start to protect your employees in the workplace?

A major reason why so many accidents occur in UK workplaces is that employers and employees don’t look at potential hazards in the right way. This isn’t purposeful neglect, but rather because that good working practice becomes habit. When this happens, we take it for granted that new employees, or those who have been promoted understand the hazards that exist.

Good health and safety at work starts with identifying all the hazards and conducting comprehensive H&S risk assessments. Then, develop an effective health and safety policy, getting your employees involved and making sure that resources are allocated to training and coaching of employees in health and safety.

Ensuring your employees are safe in your workplace is a legal obligation. More importantly, it’s a good, ethical thing to do. Injury-free workers are happier and more productive – and that is good news for your bottom line.

Start on the road to better health and safety performance today by contacting Integral and discovering how our comprehensive list of features will remove confusion and get the H&S job done fast and effectively. Get covered and compliant, with minimum time and hassle, and protect your employees from general workplace hazards now.