Is Your Health & Safety Management System Past Its Sell By Date?

Here's a quick question: is your current health & safety management system more about tick boxes and policies, or about making the work place safer? The trouble is that for many businesses health & safety management is either one or the other, but rarely both, and rarely the latter. It seems that health & safety has largely become a matter of paperwork, tick boxes, policies and protocols, with so many piles of paper and policy documents that it's becoming increasingly hard to see through it all to be able to catch a glimpse of the real workplace, and not just the one which exists in the documentation.

Why has health & safety management become so hard to manage? Is it the fault of the litigation society in which we live, or have workers genuinely become clumsier? Is it that our workplaces are now filled with technology and machinery which is increasingly powerful and dangerous, or that demands are now so high that everyone is more eager to complete the task than to consider the safety implications?

Perhaps it is many of these things and more, but the truth is that for a large number of businesses and organisations keeping on top of health & safety is a task so monumental that you're as likely to suffer a hernia just lugging the documentation around.

Of course, every year there's the dreaded health & safety audit. You glance back at last year's for inspiration, and notice that it was either woefully optimistic, depressingly inaccurate or both. Since then you realise that the laws and regulations may well have changed, equipment may have been purchased, upgraded or altered, policies amended and new workers employed who may or may not have been briefed on all current policies, protocols and practises.

It seems like a great time to cause that hernia just to get out of it, yet you know that any delay can only mean placing your business at an ever greater risk of being sued for negligence should the worst happen.

One of the main causes of this situation is that most businesses have not been able to introduce a single, seamless, consistent health & safety management protocol or policy. In the ideal world this is what you would have introduced long ago, but with each aspect of the businesses incorporating quite different work formats, different equipment, different working environment and different levels and types of risk, it has been necessary to develop individual procedures and policies covering all aspects of the business. This in itself makes for a challenging auditing task, but it also poses several unseen risks and issues.

It's easy to look at the whole issue of health & safety management from the point of view of those whose task it is to deploy and audit the health & safety procedures and protocols. Yet there are frequently a number of problems which can be overlooked by management, and experienced only on the shop floor, yet which have unseen ramifications beyond that level.

For example, the more health & safety management procedures in place, the more there is for workers to learn, remember and put into practise on a daily basis. This immediately presents a problem, because the more complex, convoluted and diverse the range of policies and procedures, the more likely it is that mistakes will happen. Confusion is the very first cause of health & safety errors, yet cannot in itself be classed as anything other than the responsibility of the employer.

If an employee has an accident because he or she did not follow safety guidelines, it may still be deemed the fault of the management if it can be demonstrated that the existing systems were so confusing and convoluted that it was unreasonable to expect the employees to implement it fully and accurately.

Another issue can be that employees feel that health & safety management is an unnecessary inconvenience, with confusing and conflicting procedures adding to the workload causing delays and misunderstanding. In such cases it is easy for employees to bypass systems, ticking boxes without reading them, accidentally overlooking procedures, or removing warning notices.

In both of these cases the result is that any information which is then available to management for the completion of an audit is going to be inaccurate and misleading, often providing evidence which suggests the workplace is safer than it really is. This only makes the task of carrying out a health & safety management audit all the more depressing, because no matter how hard you may try, if the procedures aren't being adhered to properly, there's no way that the final audit can be anything other than incomplete.

What is needed is a health & safety management system which is consistent, which can be deployed across the entire workplace, which is tamper proof, quick and efficient to complete, and provides a clear audit trail at every stage. Does such a system exist? Ask anyone who has the 'Good to Go' health & safety management system already - they'll have plenty of spare time to chat with you, because they'll have finished their audit long ago.

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