Health & safety: ignore at your peril!
It seems to me that whenever things go wrong it’s always because I’m trying to do something I’m simply not equipped or trained to do.
The five-week absence of my blog has been caused by breaking a number of bones after falling from my roof at home, where (in force 8 gales!) I was unsuccessfully attempting to brick down a tarpaulin to prevent a leak - not a job I should have tackled. Luckily I survived, some are not so lucky, and it got me thinking of the number of health and safety problems I have witnessed in my career as a business advisor.
Now I know health and safety is not a particularly sexy subject, and I’m afraid to say that like most people I have ignored it at my peril at some time or other. Skating on thin ice when it comes to your own personal safety is bad enough, but when it comes to cutting corners with employees it can quite literally land you in jail.
My first brush with health and safety problems came very early on in my career whilst working in a manufacturing business. Safety guards were routinely ignored by staff as cumbersome and thus minor finger injuries were a regular occurrence. The company had a unyielding policy: if you weren’t using the recommended guard, then it was your own fault. Nowadays this attitude would have been unlikely to have survived legal challenge and the employer would still be liable for failing to ensure that the employee used the necessary safety equipment.
I do occasionally still come across businesses where managers ignore breaches of safety because in the dim and distant past the employee has been told to not do what they are currently doing. The worst example of this was a company that was ignoring the fact that employees were routinely testing electrical equipment without switching the main circuits off. One slip could have resulted in a severe electrical shock or even death. The company were simply unaware that their current practice of ignoring this situation because, in the words of one manager “I’m sick of telling them about it” could still land them in trouble. The law would actually require you to make a breach of this nature a disciplinary offence, and tackle offenders through a mixture of safety training and dismissible offence.
Happily most of the businesses I deal with are acutely aware of the dangers of poor safety practice and take their obligations seriously. The key issues are being aware of what the various Health and Safety Acts require you to do, and then being able to assess risk in relation to this legislation.
Some businesses pay a fortune for external organisations to assess risk for them, and yet it really is as simple as observation, walking through a task before it is undertaken and asking yourself What could reasonably be expected to go wrong here?” and then putting in place a reasonable precaution to minimise that risk. Risk can never be completely eliminated, but the management of risk is part of every manager’s role, and is easier than many people imagine.
For employers the Working at Height Regulations, albeit not a tremendous bedtime read, does provide sensible guidance about managing and reducing the risk of working at heights. As a massive proportion of accidents in the workplace are caused by slips trips and falls then the more employers know about how to prevent this the better.
And as for my roof at home, well even I could have predicted that in a high wind I might fall off. If only I’d waited till the wind dropped or dragged that air-bed out from the garage … unfortunately, much of risk assessment is done with hindsight. Its always better to plan your health and safety in advance, believe me!
