Category Archives: Health & Safety

The serious (and not so serious) matter of Health & Safety in the workplace.

Hang out the bunting for Safety at Work

Workplace safety affects us all, doesn’t it? - Well it should do - Despite the bad press that elf ‘n’ safety has received over recent years, most of which is born out of poor grasp of the facts and/or legislation, Health & Safety isn’t actually the ogre that many (particularly this Government) would have us all believe…

With all the unrelenting bad press, as the stupidity of the recent Burnham-on-Sea Jubilee Bunting debacle tends to show, it’s hardly surprising that; Councils and companies are being accused of “using health and safety rules as an excuse to make unpopular decisions banning low-risk activities” (bbc.co.uk).

But in many respects it’s the lack of knowledge and understanding, that and the inherent fear of litigation, that is the root cause of many of these ‘astounding’ decisions. Health & Safety legislation was originally developed to protect workers in high risk and industrial occupations however; workplace safety needs to be considered in every workplace. Matters as diverse as bullying, computer use, work-related stress, and disability are all relevent in the workplaces, not just higher risk industrial locations. And all of them are occupational health issues impacting upon overall safety.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an employer or an employee, a self-employed trader or a director of a large company, we all have safety responsibilities. You might be a customer in a shop, or a client visiting business premises but many people have little or (worryingly) no understanding of their safety rights and responsibilities.

With all this confusion and poor understanding is it any wonder the media continue to successfully stoke the funeral pyre of our Health & Safety legislation? Protection and guidance that was actually designed and developed to protect and help us all, not hinder us, impede work or put us out of business!

Last year the government proposed the abolition of a large amount of health and safety rules (see here). This followed an earlier report by Lord Young in 2010 (see here) and a subsequent independent review carried out by Prof Ragnar E Lofstedt, director of the Centre for Risk Management at King’s College London.

Lord Young’s report Common Sense, Common Safety calls for a shake-up of health and safety measures to an end “senseless” rules and regulations and tackle Britain’s “compensation culture”…(bbc.co.uk)

But despite all the reported difficulties, much of which is simply myth (see here), Lofstedt actually concluded in his report Reclaiming health and safety for all the problems are; “less with the regulations themselves and more with the way they are interpreted and applied”. He also subsequently pointed out how the PM’s approach to health and safety isn’t helpful.

Don’t let the jobsworths jeopardise jubilee celebrations: …Often health and safety is invoked wrongly to disguise a person’s real motives – an unwillingness to honestly defend an unpopular decision, concern over costs or complexity of running an event, or worries about potential civil liability claims…(hse.gov.uk)

Health & Safety isn’t all bad, even the HSE, often feared and much maligned by many in business, say that the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations “should go ahead without red tape” – they are actively encouraging people to fight back against “health and safety nonsense” (see here).

But where do you look for the facts? It isn’t always easy to find easy to read, high quality information about workplace safety.The internet contains rafts of Health & Safety information but how much of it is up to date and correct? As with any information gleaned from the web, it’s not always a good idea to treat everything you find as the right answer to your question.

Even when you refer to ’experts’ such as the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) or the British Safety Council (BSC), the information you find is often confusing. As with any legislation, the laws and guidance relating to Health & Safety can sometimes be complicated. Because of this, it’s also easy for them to be applied incorrectly (or mischievously) as previously mentioned above.

At the risk of undermining my own worth in this field, I want to point you in the direction of an extremely useful resource. One of the best websites I’ve found of late is SafeWorkers.co.uk. This valuable and worthwhile resource was put in place to serve the needs of the lay person. You can read more than 150 of the articles they’ve produced on specialist workplace safety issues. You can also ask them a question and receive a reply published on the site.

Remember – Workplace Safety is an important consideration for all of us!

HSE Video: Health & Safety impacts on real people!

Posted in Business Babble, Health & Safety

Are you a Killer Manager?

Apr 13

Posted by Dave Hasney

Any manager with a ’killer’ work ethic should realise that a happy workforce is a productive one. Having a productive workforce may go some way towards keeping the accountants happy however; the manager who pushes too hard and ignores the health and welfare of his/her employees does so at the peril of their organisation. And hopefully their own career…

I recently highlighted the dangers of driving whilst tired for police officers (amongst others), an issue that probably impacts more upon shift workers than many others. But tiredness is (hopefully) only a relatively minor factor when you consider all the remaining health issues resulting from working shifts and excessive hours.

Many of the negative health impacts that result from shifts and working excessive hours have long been understood, both by the medical ‘experts’ and those who are required to work in this way. In recent years there have been numerous studies and reports to evidence many of the previous suppositions.

In 2005 the BBC reported that; “Employees working split shifts could be harming their health” as a result of research carried out by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The results of another study by a team from University College London, carried out over an 11-year period, highlighted the fact; working for more than 11 hours a day markedly increases heart disease risk. It pointed out that the magnitude of risk goes up by 67% for people who work long hours (see here).

This study might make us think twice about the old adage ‘hard work won’t kill you’ (Professor Stephen Holgate - Medical Research Council)

The lead researcher of the latter report, Professor Mika Kivimäki, suggested this should be “a wake-up call for people who overwork themselves, especially if they already have other risk factors” – I would agree however; many of those workers are ‘overworked’ because of the methods employed by their managers and not from any personal choice.

A further study in the European Heart Journal in 2008, focusing on more than 10,000 British civil servants showed that “a stressful job has a direct biological impact on the body, raising the risk of heart disease” (see here). But ‘stress’ is one of those mainly intangible, and mostly misunderstood, negative concepts that can (and do) have a negative impact upon one’s mental and physical well-being.

What is stress? Stress is caused by two things. Primarily it is down to whether you think situations around you are worthy of anxiety. And then it’s down to how your body reacts to your thought processes. This instinctive stress response to unexpected events is known as ‘fight or flight’…(stress.org.uk)

In humans, as in other animals, the adrenalin rush of this fight or flight process helps us to run faster and fight harder, all physical traits useful to those working within our Emergency Services for example. But the life-threatening events are not the only ones that trigger these physiological reactions. We experience them whenever we come across something unexpected or something (or someone) that frustrates our aims, goals, expectations or conditions of perceived normality.

These latter factors are all prevalent in today’s public sector. Services like the NHS and not least our police service, are currently undergoing unprecedented change. The police in particular are also under what appears to be a sustained and constant barrage of (mostly unfair) criticism and attack from the government and our media. As if the job isn’t stressful enough already! But the down side of mobilising our bodies for survival is; the process also presents negative consequences and medical conditions, ones that can have a profound impact upon our ability to work effectively, let alone personal longevity prospects!

The HSE define work-related stress as; a harmful reaction people have to undue pressures and demands place on them at work. Unsurprisingly HSE statistics show that industries reporting the highest rates of work-related stress in the last three years are within the public sector. Stress at work is a major issue for any organisation, not least those involving public service, but it is also one that almost every element of management has specific responsibilities for preventing.

The HSE produce guidelines about the Management Standards expected to mitigate the risk of work related stress. It defines six key areas that managers need to address, if they want to effectively remove/control those risks. If you are a manager, are you aware of your responsibilities?

Well-designed, organised and correctly managed work helps to maintain and promote individual health and well-being i.e. happy workers. But conversely, as with much of the so-called police reform currently taking place, where there has been insufficient attention to organisation and/or task design along with some frightening examples of poor management, the benefits or assets associated with good work conditions are lost. The common result of this being work related stress.

People who feel they have some control over their working lives are then less likely to have illnesses (Professor Cary Cooper - Lancaster University)

Considering all these health impacts, you would think that much of the political rhetoric about ’doing more with less’ should have fallen on deaf ears by now, unfortunately this isn’t the case. A combination of government enforced austerity measures, along with a predominance of self-interested senior management in the public sector, has prevented it.

The one positive outcome from all this (if you can call it that) is; killer management is likely to mitigate the future financial impacts placed upon our society by an ageing population!