Consider this: your son or daughter sustains a serious debilitating injury. The cause is a load of junk lying around in his or her workplace. Staff frequently warned the employer that it represented a hazard but the employer fobbed off concerns and put it on the long finger. Now that obvious risk has been realised and it’s too late to prevent your child’s life from being blighted. It was all so preventable but it “was too much bother to do something about it today.”
Awareness Is Half The Battle
The employer is often represented by the site supervisor who may be totally unaware of the legal obligations of employers to keep staff safe in the workplace. Perhaps that supervisor was never trained by the company or the company thinks H&S rules do not apply to them because their line of business is “safe”. All of these are misconceptions.
Health & Safety compliance is actually pretty simple and easy to achieve, despite what a lot of people think. It’s not a whole load of useless and costly red tape that should be fed to a “bonfire of regulations.” Compliance is what reduces fatal accidents in the workplace as well as non-fatal injuries – all of which cost a company money apart from the sad and avoidable human element.
Training Is Not Complex Or Time Consuming
Construction sites are especially full of hazards and that’s why the Government has enacted special regulations for situations like working at height or working with hazardous substances or with lifting equipment. But 90% of keeping safe in any workplace is down to conscious awareness in the minds of employees who have been instructed in basic safety procedures and reminded of them from time to time. That awareness does not usually come naturally to people – they need to be shown and told about common hazards and what to do to reduce the risk of harm from them.
For example, one of the first things that many employees are trained in with any type of business is how to perform safe lifting so that their legs take the bulk of the strain and not their backs. It’s simple once you have been shown, and demonstrations literally take only seconds to perform. But without that basic training, most people are totally unaware of how to avoid the risk of damaging their backs.
Start Protecting Your People Today
Protecting people is what H&S is all about, and not just employees but customers and other visitors too. There really is no justification for ignoring the rules. To do so is to risk subjecting someone to the type of serious injury that can destroy a life and the life of a victim’s family. Nobody deliberately wants to go down that route but it is exactly where carelessness and ignorance can take us all too easily.
There really is no excuse for not implementing the basic steps that H&S rules call for. They are so simple and easy for most businesses that it’s a no brainer to adopt them, even if it’s from a selfish point of view of protecting the company’s interests. The motivation is unimportant – what matters is action.
Taking The Next Steps
Find out just how easy it is to achieve H&S compliance and, at the same time, be seen to protect the interests of your workforce. Download our free eBook A Practical Guide To UK Health and Safety and start to raise your standards today.
