Chamber Blog: Improving Health & Safety Efficiency in the Workplace

When it comes to living in the adult world, we sometimes need to take a step back and reflect on what we are doing/saying/teaching/treating – (delete the appropriate words) and think about how we can become better/more productive/efficient/worthy – (delete as needed).

So, let’s take a moment and reflect on how we work in our workplace.

Children go about their days with a purpose to ensure that they have an end goal in whatever they are doing. We can break this down into steps:

1. Decide which toy to play with
2. Make up a story in their heads
3. Play with toy and act out their story
4. Ask Mummy or Daddy if they saw what they did and seek approval
5. Use the feedback to learn, ask more questions ready for next time
6. Repeat exactly or change to suit the feedback given.

Does this make any sense? If not, lets break it down.

As an adult, we can put this into practice:

1. Decide on what we are going to do – what we are going to produce/provide, who are we going to meet/call/visit?
2. Plan on how we are going to do it – gain the appropriate contact details/material information etc.
3. Perform the action – make the product, speak with the person etc.
4. Reflect on that action – how did it go, what feedback did we receive, is there any approval?
5. Improve on it for next time – this is the review process of the whole process, what went right, what went wrong?
6. Repeat the process or change our process.

Can we use this analogy in health and safety? Of course we can.

1. Plan – think about the current situation, indicate what you want to achieve, how you will measure performances and provide contingency planning.
2. Do – assess your risks, organise the activities to help deliver the plan, provide the resources and communicate everything to your workers, implement the plan and instruct and/or supervise the workers.
3. Check – measure your performance. Have the plans been implemented suitably? Assess if your aims and objectives are being achieved through a good quality audit system.
4. Act – Learn from mistakes, accidents, incidents, ill-health, near misses, plus those from other organisations, revisit the plans, policy documents and risk assessments to ensure they are suitably updated.

This is known as the PDCA cycle of health and safety management and helps you achieve a balance between systems and behaviour aspects of management.

So, we can see that if we follow a logical step process, we can ensure that we are more productive, better informed, more approachable, better teachers/learners, more efficient and safer – don’t delete these, as they are all appropriate!

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