Life around safety and hygiene

Healthy Life Promoting a strong and resilient health and safety (H&S) culture isn’t rocket science but it does take time, effort and resources.

Awareness by Farhan Pinara

Ensure that senior management is committed

Senior management needs to be on board with health and safety. Obvious and wholehearted commitment from the management team boosts team motivation and helps ensure employees that their health and well being are always priority number one.

Senior, middle and junior managers all need to lead by example when it comes to health and safety.

Good managers can often be found on the ‘shop floor’ demonstrating their commitment and chatting through health and safety concerns with employees.

All concern and commitment needs to be (and appear) genuine or employees will likely assume that that the interest comes from commercial intent or corporate box-checking.

Practice communication across levels of seniority

In a strong culture, health and safety should be a part of everyday conversations and everyday concerns.

If managers listen to employees on a regular basis and enquire about health and safety then they’re building up a well of trust. That way, when an accident or a near miss occurs, you can have an open dialogue about what went wrong and how it can be fixed or prevented in the future.

If employees do not feel there is sufficient support, you will probably never about the misses or mistakes that were made and will only see the results when it’s too late

Awareness by Mohd Aijaz

Reasons You Would Need Good Hygiene

1. Disease Prevention

Good hygiene lowers your risk for diseases and illnesses commonly spread through viruses and bacteria. Your hands come into contact with bacteria every time you cough, use the restroom, touch your pet, or touch surfaces, such as stair railings, used frequently by others. Failing to wash your hands and body regularly can cause this bacteria to multiply, increasing the risk for infection and other health problems. Washing yourself and staying clean can kill and remove illness-causing bacteria from your body, lowering the risk for disease.[1]

Good hygiene is key to preventing infection when wounds and skin irritation are present. Poor hygiene can result in dirt and other bacteria entering and staying inside skin wounds, while good hygiene can ward off this bacteria to prevent infection. Good hygiene prevents you from spreading bacteria and disease to others, including coworkers and family members.

2. Social and Professional Acceptance

Spending time around those who fail to demonstrate good hygiene can be unpleasant due to factors such as bad breath and body odor, and it increases your own risk for disease and infection. Poor hygiene can have negative consequences on your social life and relationships — including business relationships.

Many employers urge or require employees to practice good hygiene and tend to hire people who look clean and as though they practice healthy hygiene habits. Good hygiene is especially important to employers in the food and medical industries, as poor hygiene can lead to contamination and the spread of disease.[3]

Children who practice good hygiene can avoid being bullied at school, as evidence suggests that poor hygiene is one of the top reasons kids are bullied.[4] Parents who teach their children the importance of good hygiene instill healthy habits early on in life and prevent them from experiencing problems with bullies.

Awareness By Vibhanshu Swami

Sprinkle health and safety into everyday life

The more times you hear something the more likely you are to remember it. Toolbox talks are a super clever way to build training and repetition into everyday life.A toolbox talk is a short informal health and safety discussion on a very specific health and safety matter.

Sending entire groups of staff away for health and safety training is extortionate and time consuming. What if we told you there was another way? Toolbox talks are inexpensive, not tremendously time consuming and make sure that health and safety is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, all the time. What more could you want?.

Instead of sending whole teams off on training days, why not send the minimum of staff away and have them report back small bite sized talks that you can cover in your weekly catch ups?

We’ve all done the odd training course and we’d be lying if we said they were all equally thrilling. Because a toolbox talk is so short and specific, there’s no time for bullshit and not long enough for attendees to snooze!

Take every concern seriously

This step goes hand-in-hand with genuine management concern. To build trust that spans from senior management to junior employees to floor staff to HR, employees need to know that every concern they raise is taken seriously.Never dismiss concerns as trivial and always deal with them via official processes.

Awareness By Sai Amulya

Tailor training and PPE to the individual

Traditionally, personal protective equipment (PPE) was a one size fits all kind of deal. And that’s still the case some places.

Now, if you’re a size medium or large male and have fairly average dimensions, then that’s no biggie. But if you’re a petite guy or a girl, then the ‘standard’ size probably won’t fit you.

If employees spend a significant amount of hours in their PPE, you need to make sure they are comfortable.

Form a PPE committee that will discuss requirements, want and needs. Oh, and make sure the people in committee are a well represented sample of the workplace!

With regards to training, every single person doesn’t need the same courses nor induction programmes. Plan a personal induction programme for each individual role to make sure that the new employees are taught exactly what they need to know.

Awareness By Shikha Paliwal

Encourage employee participation

If you want to build a resilient culture then you need every employee to take ownership of their work. By including employees in things such as workshops and risk assessments you are leveraging the unique knowledge that each individual has of their own work and role.

Safety is a joint exercise. If senior management isn’t fully on-board, it wont work. And likewise with floor staff.

Awareness By Arpit Kashyap

Deliver a damn good induction programme

When someone new starts in a role, there’s a unique window of opportunity to teach them the right ways before they start to adopt annoying habits or before they’re taught someone’s personal interpretation of the rules.

Make sure that every new employee start their job with a solid, tailored induction. This way they’ll know what’s right and wrong in your company.

It’s way easier to set strong foundations for healthy habits, than try and change them a year in when you realise someone’s doing something the wrong way.Building a strong health and safety culture can be hard and it ultimately depends on the staff that work in an organisation. However, we hope these steps will set you on your way. If you need any help setting up toolbox talks or are sending your staff away for training, please do not hesitate to get in touch and we’d be happy to give you a custom quote on what we can do for you.