In the first part of this two-part post, we discussed why health and safety needs to be aligned with the growth of the business and, at all costs, to avoid being seen as a cost centre. How do we, therefore, make health and safety a keystone habit? Something the business obsesses over and which, ultimately, becomes the engine of business … Read More
Aligning Health and Safety With Business Growth (Part 1 of 2)
In our last post on the changing role of the Health and Safety Manager we posited that there is an ever increasing requirement for the H&S Manager to justify their existence and that the most enduring way to provide this justification is to align health and safety performance with the growth of the business. The alternatives to aligning with growth … Read More
The H&S (Swiss Army Knife) Manager
In the heat of the summer of 2018, we discussed how technology could become the rallying call to attract younger people into the health and safety profession. Eighteen months on we revisit the subject, but more broadly with the remit of exploring the changing role of the Health and Safety Manager. The original post coincided with SHP’s launch of New … Read More
Improving Risk Management in Financial Services
The global banking and the broader financial services industry leaves the last decade on a much more solid footing than it left the previous decade. Then, the financial crisis had wreaked its chaos but now, as Deloitte notes, “The global banking system is not only bigger and more profitable but also more resilient than at any time in the last … Read More
Flexible Working and Finnish Trust
I don’t know what the commute is like in Finland but I doubt it comes close to that suffered by the majority of us in the UK. Yet, while the Finns brought the latest version of their Working Hours Act into effect on Jan 1, 2020, I spent 3 hours driving the 50 miles to Southampton last week through the … Read More
Ruminating Cows, Trojan Horses and More Reasons to be Cheerful in 2020
This is the third in the trilogy of posts taking an optimistic look at UK health and safety issues in 2020. The first focused on Brexit, the second on the role that data and technology can play in improving health and safety outcomes, while this one is all about ruminating cows and trojan horses [really? – Ed]. OK, seriously, we’ll … Read More
2020 Vision – More Reasons to be Cheerful
In our last post of 2019, we started this trilogy of optimistic looks into UK health and safety in 2020. This post, the second of the three, focuses on the optimism afforded by data and technology. Are we talking about using data and technology in isolation? As a replacement for human reasoning? No. Or, data and technology as an adjunct … Read More
2020 Vision – 3 Reasons to be Cheerful
2020 has the look of a great year. Just the numbers laid out beside each other. 2019 appeared awkward (and it was, very) but 2020 has a calming, hopeful look to it. It’s an Olympic year and there’s something Olympian about the way the numbers sit on the page. I’ve never studied Numerology but I Googled ‘2020’ and, sure enough, … Read More
Toxic Schools
The recent political landscape in the UK has left some/many(?) wondering if our political classes are really capable of making and managing the changes needed to help us prosper and keep us safe. This latest election campaign has often represented a drunken brawl in the street among candidates purporting to stand on a law and order ticket. Feel free to … Read More
Mental Health – A Pinch of Optimism
The last ten years have clearly seen the lifting of the taboo around mental health, including mental well-being in the workplace and, more generally, mental health in society and across many demographics. There is more to do, but the change has been demonstrable. The 2017 Thriving at Work Stevenson/Farmer review on mental health and employees put the cost of poor … Read More
Let’s Hope this Post Helps You Sleep
It’s not every health and safety blog post that links Baader-Meinhof, Inspector Morse and has the express intent of helping you sleep, but this one does. The post’s genesis is in the seeming deluge of articles on driver safety over the past few weeks. Driver safety is an extremely important topic with the focus here being on driving for work … Read More
Megatrends, Wellness and Safety
Buried in our Halloween post were some wellness and safety ideas that came out of the latest Euromonitor International megatrends analysis and which deserve expansion here. Firstly, the megatrends analysis. What is it? It’s a lifestyle survey of 1,000+ people in each of 40 countries, conducted annually and aimed at identifying the megatrends shaping consumer markets. These megatrends are driven … Read More
What Can We Learn When We Include Member of Public Fatalities?
In our last post, which focused on the Transportation & Storage sector, we highlighted the number of workplace fatal injuries to members of the public and stated that “if you add in the member of public fatalities [to worker fatalities], Transportation & Storage accounts for by far the most fatalities with 66 in 2017/18, exactly double that of the next … Read More
What’s Happening with Health & Safety in Transportation & Storage?
One sector that seems to have been in the health and safety news a lot recently is Transportation and Storage (SIC 2007 code H). The HSE report against this sector as a whole despite the somewhat diverse nature of companies that sit beneath the main headings of: 49 – Land transport and transport via 50 – Water transport 51 – … Read More
Halloween, Megatrends and Wellness
It’s Halloween! The day of ghosts and ghouls, apple-bobbing and trick or treating. It’s actually ‘New Year’s Eve’ from ancient Celtic times and a day when the worlds of the dead and the alive came together, a day when the Druids (the Celtic Priests) were better able to predict the future because of the presence of the dead. The origins … Read More
The Rise of the Machines: The Good, The Bad and the Grey Goo
The IOSH Future Leader Conference is taking place on November 5th and includes a session titled ‘Robots: meet your new colleagues’, by health and safety consultant Bridget Leathley. This should be a really interesting examination of the benefits that robots and cobots (robot co-workers) can bring to occupational health and safety. The Future Leaders Conference is aimed at those new … Read More
