Member Article

Not worth losing sleep over

If you want to put your house in order to protect yourself, your reputation, your business and your employees but you just can’t afford a full-time health and safety resource, what do you do?

It’s a situation many small-business leaders recognise but the silver-lining is it’s a dilemma the regulators themselves have identified and prescribed for. And in an era where common sense and proportion reign supreme, the trouble and cost associated with doing the right thing are probably not worth losing sleep over.

Step 1 – appoint a competent person

Getting the wrong advice can end up costing you money unnecessarily and a glance at the newspapers is enough to tell you there’s plenty of silly advice out there when it comes to health and safety. A competent safety practitioner will explore your safety challenges with you from your point of view and help you discover the most practical solutions for you and your business. Fortunately, finding such people has been made easier since the advent of the HSE’s Occupational Safety and Health Consultants Register (OSHCR)¹ and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) also provide advice on finding and working with safety professionals².

Step 2 – find out what your priorities are

If there are immediate dangers, these will need to be put right and again, a competent adviser will help you explore the best solutions for you and your business. Assuming however that there is no imminent threat of injury or ill-health, a competent adviser will support you in carrying out a compliance audit. The objective is to identify your priorities according to the degree of non-compliance and the consequences of non-compliance – not to find out what you need to do to achieve world-class status; unless of course you decide that is your objective.

Step 3 – decide what your policies are

For each of the priorities identified above, who needs to do what precisely to maintain control and allow you to sleep at night? You don’t need War and Peace; you need clear, concise statements. And there’s absolutely no reason why a policy statement for a particular subject, say fork lift trucks for example, shouldn’t fit on one side of a piece of A4 paper. Policy statements should be easy to communicate and easy to audit.

Step 4 – get organised

Who needs to be trained in what? You need your employees to understand the risks involved in what they’re doing and how to protect themselves. There are some excellent courses available at extremely reasonable prices and a competent practitioner will help you identify the most suitable course(s) and the best way of providing the all-important company-specific content to supplement the generic.

You also need employees to know what to do when something unusual or unexpected happens and how to look after themselves and each other. Get their minds right and little else matters.

Step 5 – examine each task

Risk assessment helps determine what risks there are at a task level and which, if any, are not currently being controlled adequately? You’re not expected to spend the earth on trivial risks – you’re required to do what is reasonable. A competent safety practitioner will support you in understanding and deploying a simple approach to risk assessment and will help with those tricky matters of judgement.

Step 6 – measure how well you’re doing

You will no doubt measure how well you’re doing in other areas of your business. So you can too in health and safety, using simple techniques to help you see ahead of time when things might be going wrong.

To audit is simply to examine or check what you actually do in practice. It’s proactive in that it helps you to see what is working and what needs tweaking. A regular cycle of checking and correcting is the engine behind improvement.

Step 7 - review

This is the time for looking back to see how you’ve done and what, if anything, needs to be done differently. By this stage there’s every chance you’re able to manage your health and safety for yourself with a minimum of input from your safety adviser.

The scope and variety of issues that fall within the remit of ‘health and safety’ is vast and management of them can often appear reactive and chaotic. This programme provides a clear, structured process which is consistent with the regulators own advice.³

There will always be distractions, priorities requiring urgent attention, but ultimately everything can be seen in the context of this holistic approach to managing health and safety.

References

1. http://www.oshcr.org/

2. IOSH (January 2012): Getting help with health and safety – practical guidance on working with a consultant

3. HSE (1997): HSG65 Successful health and safety management

Michael Emery, CMIOSH

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Christina Stocks .