HEALTH & SAFETY
COMMERCIALISING COMPLIANCE
Conforming to health and safety procedures can often seem like quite a burden. But, as Nick Whiteley, CEO of hfx suggests, the technology available to help
organisations meet the demands of bureaucracy can both boost the wellbeing of staff and increase the competitiveness of your company.
With all the tick box exercises and audits it can be easy to lose sight of the purpose of health and safety. However, at its core, it is that organisations (whether private or public) owe a duty of care to their staff and covers the environment in which they work, the duties they carry out, the hours they work and the tools that they use to conduct their duties.
Inadequate equipment, poor environment and fatigue through long hours can impact on quality, cause accidents, absences, and in serious cases reputational damage, legal action and loss of revenue. If care of your staff doesn’t grab your attention, then the potential costs most certainly will. Two of the world’s biggest disasters (Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez oil spill) were the result of human error linked to fatigue. An accident in your organisation may not end up polluting the world, but it could just put you out of business.
But many organisations regard health and safety as a “compliance issue”, a burdensome admin job that someone needs to do, but in fact when done right it is a competitive advantage that improves productivity, efficiency and quality as well as staff retention and motivation. If you start to think of health and safety as a commercial venture rather than an issue of conformity, your whole approach begins to change.
The good news is that technology is readily available to simplify and automate many aspects of the industry, not simply to avoid the manual paper chase but to improve the health and safety of your staff and the competitiveness of your organisation.
Studies have shown that working long hours reduces both productivity and quality. For example, working 60 hours a week does not deliver 50% more than 40 hours a week. Once you factor in potential for poor quality and accidents then you may be getting nothing in return for paying additional hours. Getting work hours right has other benefits too; a recent study in Sweden showed that a six-hour working day reduced sickness by 50%.
Solutions such as Imperago enable rosters to be generated that not only meet business demands but also consider suitability for staff, risk and fatigue. The result is shift patterns that not only meet business requirements and benefit staff but also reduce costs and risks.
Time and attendance solutions enable organisations to easily manage and monitor worked hours to minimise overtime and breaks between shifts to prevent staff
36 | TOMORROW’S FM
“If you start to think of health and
safety as a commercial venture rather than an issue of conformity, your whole approach begins to change.”
fatigue. Some solutions also come with roll-call options that link to fire alarms and produce real-time muster reports direct to managers (or printers) in case of fire.
One of the reasons why hfx developed CloudMuster and MusterPoint (links to fire alarms and 3g eMusterPoints) was the result our office fire in 2015. As a technology company we knew that a clipboard and pen was not an efficient or accurate way of checking the whereabouts of our staff.
Naturally not all staff work in a building or office, many, such as care workers, make frequent external visits a day and this creates its own set of safety issues. But even in these situations there are eSolutions that enable staff to be tracked (via GPS) during working hours to ensure their safety.
Of course, you shouldn’t ever just react by throwing technology at a problem and walking away, but neither should you throw a clipboard, pen and tick box at it either in the hope that this absolves you or your organisation of responsibility for the Health & Safety of your staff.
Above all a positive approach to health & safety comes with the realisation that everybody wins when staff safety and wellbeing is a core part of the business plan not an external imposition.
hfx.co.uk twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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