Safety first!

"With great power, comes great responsibility." 

It goes without saying that running your own business, or being in a position of authority within a large and well-known company means that you are responsible for the safety and well-being of your employees.

This means that you are responsible for implementing health and safety regulations within the workplace to ensure that employees do not come to any harm.

Effective Leadership = Safer Workplace

Over the years, many high-profile safety cases have occurred due to failures in leadership. This can not only be dangerous for staff, but it can also be severely damaging to your company's reputation - and in some cases, may even result in prosecution of the person held responsible.

Health and safety law places duties on organisations and employers, and directors can be personally liable when these duties are breached: members of the board have both a collective and individual responsibility for health and safety – it's very important, and can save lives.

Addressing health and safety should not be seen as a regulatory burden and a 'chore' as it offers significant opportunities. 

Benefits of implementing health and safety include:

• Reduced costs and reduced risks – employee absence and turnover rates are lower, accidents are fewer, the threat of legal action is lessened; 
• Improved standing among suppliers and partners; 
• A better reputation for corporate responsibility among investors, customers and communities;
• Increased productivity – employees are healthier, happier and better motivated (you can't argue with that!).

Poor health and safety at work can result in a number of human and financial costs. These include:

• Millions of working days lost due to work-related illness and injury.
• Fatalities caused by occupational diseases. (Did you know a worker is fatally injured almost every working day?)
• Organisations incurring further costs through uninsured losses and loss of reputation.

How Can You Safe-Guard Against Incidents?

As a Director (or a board member), there are a number of things you can do in order to reduce accidents in the workplace. These include:

1. Ensuring that health and safety arrangements are adequately resourced;
2. Obtaining competent health and safety advice;
3. Carrying out risk assessments;
4. Investing in safety equipment;
5. Involving employees in decisions that affect their health and safety;
6. Considering the health and safety implications of introducing new processes; new working practices or new personnel; dedicating adequate resources to the task; and seeking advice where necessary. 
7. Ensuring that boardroom decisions are made in the context of the organisation's health and safety policy. It is important to consider and include for health and safety when implementing change.

How Do Dalvie Systems Safe-Guard Against Incidents?

Being a business that deals primarily with installation work, we know how important it is to keep on top of health and safety. So, we thought we'd share how we deal with health and safety, to give you an idea about how you can adopt similar practices in your workplace:

1. When we go to site (prior to an installation), we carry out risk assessments to ensure that: a) the site is safe to work on for our installation team, and b) that the installation team will be adopting a safe working practice. For example, if they are going to be working at height they will need to have harnesses. Or if they are going to be transporting heavy materials we will need to provide pallet trucks or fork lifts for them to use.
2. Shaun Jones, our Contract Control Manager, will issue risk and method statements to our installation team and our client(s) to ensure that everybody is in the know about our safe working practice for that particular job. 
3. In nearly all cases, safety equipment including hard hats, gloves, protective glasses and steel toe cap boots are worn by our teams to ensure that they are protected from any potential warehouse hazards.
4. In some cases, our clients have induction sessions prior to us working on site to ensure that our installation team are fully aware of their health and safety practices, and how their site operates (signing in and out, fire evacuation procedures, highlighting warehouse vehicle and pedestrian zones etc). 
5. In the unlikely event of a safety breach, we have practices and the relevant paperwork in place to deal with this. 
6. Once a job has been completed, we ensure that our installation team is signed off by the client. This is mainly to ensure customer satisfaction, but it is also to ensure that the client is 100% happy with the installation from a safety point-of-view.
7. As part of our ISO9001 safety accreditation, after a job has finished we send an installation questionnaire to our customers in order to obtain feedback about the work we've completed. Feedback is useful to help us implement change in terms of our general working practices, as well as our safety practices.