The Ideas Distillery
  • Home
  • ISO systems
    • Benefits of ISO systems
    • How to get (and keep!) ISO certification
    • ISO certification FAQs
  • Implementation
    • ISO Implementation overview
    • ISO 9001 QMS Support
    • ISO 14001 EMS Support
    • ISO 45001 H&SMS Support
    • ISO 27001 ISMS Support
    • Certification Threshold Service®
  • Maintenance
    • Maintenance Services Overview
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Bronze
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Silver
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Gold
    • Internal Audits Service
    • Online Compliance Management
  • Improvement
    • Business Process Mapping
    • ISOs and business improvement book
    • ID TV Channel
  • About
    • Contact
    • About Us
    • Meet our team
    • Video Testimonials
    • Blog
    • Knowledge Base
    • Press Room

Effective health & safety training can combat costs

1/25/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
As part of ISO 45001 (health and safety) standards, worker competency plays an important part, particularly with regard to making workers aware of hazard identification.

This is because workplace injuries are indicative of breakdowns in basic processes and procedures that threaten the efficiency and financial health of an organisation. So effective health and safety training is a good way to combat the costs associated with bad practice.

Workplace accidents and injuries significantly damage the productivity and efficiency of your operations. Studies have estimated that for every £1 of direct costs incurred in treating and providing disability benefits to an injured employee, employers incur an additional £4 in indirect costs, such as management time spent investigating and handling the claim, lost productivity of the injured worker, hiring and retraining a replacement employee, associated property damage and more.

The cumulative consequences of injuries and accidents are sobering. Such incidents seriously affect bottom-line profit by adding unnecessary costs to your operations and subjecting your company to potential fines and penalties. These costs can range from tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds, depending on the size and scope of your business.

Once your organisation has embraced the need to prioritise workplace safety, it must then focus on two interrelated, yet distinctly different, objectives: compliance and accident prevention.

Many organisations, however, make the mistake of limiting their efforts to this first objective, and neglect the second, much greater, challenge: accident prevention. A successful workplace safety programme requires that an organisation address and achieve both objectives.

It’s a sobering thought that 95% of all injuries and accidents are caused by unsafe employee acts, not unsafe conditions.

For example, you may develop very effective standard operating procedures only to discover that no one is following them. You may provide safety glasses and hearing protection, but find no one is wearing them. You may build an ergonomically friendly workstation only to observe poor posture or a ‘creative’ workstation setup.

Because workers’ compensation is a ‘no fault’ system, the costs of injuries that result from lack of employee compliance will still be borne by the organisation, so the only way to ensure a truly successful safety programme is to make the management team responsible for actually preventing injuries and accidents.

In order to accomplish this, a bit of psychology is required. Before managers can take steps to prevent unsafe behaviour they need to first understand what causes people to behave unsafely. This might sound obvious, but when you consider that no one sets out to get injured intentionally, you realise that the complexities of human nature are indeed at play.

There are a range of reasons employees perform unsafe acts. For example, they don’t know the right procedures. Management assumes people will exercise good common sense and therefore does not adequately train employees. Often this is the outcome of safety instruction that is far too general – for example ‘be careful’. Conversely, it may result from handing an employee a large safety rules guide and simply instructing them to read it and sign the dotted line.

Either way, the employee does not really understand – and is therefore not able to follow – correct safety procedures.

They also take short cuts. Sometimes this occurs because an employee simply gets lazy, and believes it’s just easier to not follow the rules. On the other hand, it can also occur because management has inadvertently encouraged not following the rules by placing unrealistic demands on employees or undertaking poor planning, which in turn results in undo pressure to cut corners to meet deadlines.

Then they can get complacent. Statistically, we know that employees can perform an unsafe act hundreds – even thousands – of times, with no resulting accident. This lack of negative consequence reinforces the unsafe behaviour, creating bad work habits and the attitude that “it will never happen to me.”

We know, however, that the more times unsafe acts occur, statistically the more frequently an accident or injury will result.

The key, then, to eliminating injuries and accidents and ultimately the associated costs, is to eliminate unsafe behaviour by counteracting the scenarios outlined above.

If you would like to look at how to implement an ISO 45001 health & safety management system, then simply contact us.

Or, if you want to see what's involved in more detail, then get a completely free, no obligation, totally tailored ISO Gap Analysis for your business (only available to UK businesses).

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

      NEVER MISS AN ARTICLE - SIGN UP FOR OUR BLOG UPDATES
    Submit

    Welcome

    Here you'll find the latest blog articles on all things compliance, particularly focussed on quality, environment, health & safety and information security.


    Get a completely free, no obligation, totally tailored ISO Gap Analysis for your business...
    FREE ISO GAP ANALYSIS

    Categories

    All
    Environment
    Health And Safety
    Information Security
    ISO Management System
    Quality


    Archives

    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018

    RSS Feed

Ideas Distillery logo
T: 029 2196 1066
E: info@ideasdistillery.co.uk
Picture
Picture
Read about our ISO implementation services...

Read about our ISO maintenance services...

Sign up to our free, genuinely useful Monthly Newsletter full of ISO news, regulation bulletins, top tools and blogs
​GDPR Data and Information Policy
​Privacy Policy
HTML sitemap
XML sitemap
  • Home
  • ISO systems
    • Benefits of ISO systems
    • How to get (and keep!) ISO certification
    • ISO certification FAQs
  • Implementation
    • ISO Implementation overview
    • ISO 9001 QMS Support
    • ISO 14001 EMS Support
    • ISO 45001 H&SMS Support
    • ISO 27001 ISMS Support
    • Certification Threshold Service®
  • Maintenance
    • Maintenance Services Overview
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Bronze
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Silver
    • Certifications Compliance Package - Gold
    • Internal Audits Service
    • Online Compliance Management
  • Improvement
    • Business Process Mapping
    • ISOs and business improvement book
    • ID TV Channel
  • About
    • Contact
    • About Us
    • Meet our team
    • Video Testimonials
    • Blog
    • Knowledge Base
    • Press Room