Health and safety – most of us are very aware of its importance in the workplace, but how many of us work in an environment where a full health and safety plan is properly implemented?
Installing an efficient and watertight health and safety program presents a number of benefits and protections to any business, regardless of the industry or day to day processes concerned. For business that cares about its financial, legal and employee framework, staying on top of internal health and safety, and changing regulations, is an essential facet to success.
What is health and safety?
By definition, health and safety is the “regulations and procedures intended to prevent accident or injury in workplaces or public environments”.
In every workplace, it’s the employer’s duty to ensure its staff is able to work in safe conditions, practice good safety-related habits and generally minimise the risk of accidents in the workplace. For instance, in areas that experience harsh winters, part of the employer’s key role in keeping the site safe would be ensuring fully stocked yellow grit bin storage containers so that the grit is dry and on hand for when the bad weather strikes. Likewise, there is a level of personal responsibility afforded to every employee to ensure they themselves are working safely and in the correct way.
Every businesses health and safety plan is largely based off of the Health and Safety Act of 1974, which sets out three general duties every employer and employee should follow:
- The duties employers have towards employers and members of the public
- The duties employees have to themselves and to each other
- The duties certain self-employed workers have towards themselves and others.
Health and safety comes in many forms in the work place, covering everything from fire safety and first aid through to risk assessments and use of high quality protective equipment where required.
The importance of training your staff
While it is the employer’s responsibility to ensure their staff practice good health and safety habits, it’s also important that the employees accept their own responsibility in the process in order to create the buy-in required to operate at efficient level.
Your health and safety procedures are in place largely to protect your employees, so without them on board it’s impossible to truly ensure optimal health and safety standards. Thus, detailed instruction and training is instrumental if you want your employees to carry out their tasks safely without endangering their own health or that of those around them.
The benefits of a well implemented health and safety plan
Understanding the vast benefits a proper health and safety plan can provide to a business goes a long way to finding the motivation and resources to ensure one is installed properly. Without proper health and safety, businesses expose themselves to variety of risks, which can have any number of damaging or even catastrophic financial and legal consequences.
Because of that, a proper safety plan can offer the following (as per to the Health and Safety Executive):
- Reduced costs
- Reduced risks
- Lower employee absence and turnover rates
- Fewer accidents
- Lessened threat of legal action
- Improved standing among suppliers and partners
- Better reputation for corporate responsibility among investors, customers and communities
- Increased productivity, because employees are healthier, happier and better motivated.
Even if a business’s motivations lie solely in reducing costs and the threat of legal action, a thorough health and safety process makes sense. However, with the additional possibility of addressing ethical concerns, bettering brand reputation and improving staff morale and retention, it’s clear that most businesses invest in their health and safety for a multitude of reasons.