FEATURE ON CLOUD NINE
Tomorrow’s Health & Safety catches up with John Southall, Director of Southalls health and safety consultancy to find out more about the issue of health and safety compliance.
SO JOHN, TELL US MORE
ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND. I started out as a Health & Safety Enforcement Officer at Coventry City Council which involved me visiting a range of companies enforcing health and safety law. I visited restaurants, warehouses, shops and steel stock holders, to name a few, and during that time I realised there was a gap in the market for not only health and safety consultancy that was more bespoke to businesses, but also health and safety software.
So from 2003 onwards Southall’s became a reality – we went out to offer a service that was commensurate with people’s needs. There were (and still are) a lot of national providers that provide a one size fits all approach, but we wanted to offer something that was fit for purpose.
AS A HEALTH & SAFETY ENFORCEMENT OFFICER WHAT DID YOU SEE OUT IN
THE FIELD? I saw a lot of businesses trying to do it themselves, which involved them not spending a lot of time on health and safety, or spending a lot of time on it and still not achieving much. Others used a boiler plate approach – using national consultancies providing blank template risk assessments and implementing a standardised health and safety policy.
From our point of view – we saw that lots of businesses needed someone to undertake the implementation. What people needed was to have someone walk through the process with them.
DID YOU SEE INSTANCES OF NON-COMPLIANCE WITH HEALTH AND SAFETY LEGISLATION AS AN ENFORCEMENT OFFICER
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OR JUST BUSINESSES WITH INEFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS? A bit of both. There were instances of businesses not understanding what worked for their business and others where workplaces adopted a clunky approach which focused on just ticking boxes. They ticked the boxes that made them compliant with the law as opposed to taking the route that would make their business work better and provide a return on investment.
Now, we try and flick a switch and change people’s perspectives to see that health and safety isn’t just a tick box exercise. We illustrate that addressing health and safety issues in a certain way can help with other areas of the business.
WHAT DO SOUTHALL’S OFFER? It’s twofold – we are a health and safety consultancy, although I don’t like that word that much. We go into businesses and help them put together a strategy and a management system focused on their health and safety needs.
The second part of our offer is Safety Cloud which is an online health and safety management and we tend to marry the two offers. We have some clients that are software-only and some operate a managed service.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF A
CLOUD SERVICE? Often businesses keep everything health and safety related on paper. Others store this information on Excel and intranet systems within their business on a central drive, or have it saved locally on someone’s laptop.
If everything is on paper – it can easily be lost or destroyed and the information is hard to trace. Laptops can also get stolen or lost which also make them a clunky solution.
Storing information on the cloud allows businesses to devolve responsibility to people on a local level – allowing employees in different branches to add training, compliance, accidents, equipment and inductions to the system.
ARE YOU ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO MOVE AWAY FROM ANY SYSTEM THAT ISN’T
CLOUD BASED? Absolutely. It is all about providing people with accessible, real time information to enable them to make better informed decisions. These types of systems allow a lot of people to contribute to the health and safety process meaning information isn’t all filtered through one person.
SO WHAT IS SOUTHALL’S AIM
FOR THE FUTURE? Our vision is to be the go-to provider of cloud based health and safety services to the industry and we are doing that by constant evolution, driven by the customer.
Our team are ex-HSE or ex-local authority enforcement officers so we like to let people know we are health and safety people ‘doing software’, not software people ‘doing health and safety’ - I think there is a big difference because we understand the end game.
www.southalls.com
www.tomorrowshs.com
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