Chủ Nhật, 27 tháng 1, 2013

Why is it important to manage health and safety?

By Ian Pemberton


Have a moment to really think what would happen if there were a major accident at your work. How would it touch with you and your co- workers?

Contemplate the injured worker. Their own suffering and pain, and how their family could be impacted. It is likely that they will have an extended stay in hospital and could never again work. Or maybe worse - what if the incident had been fatal? It would be awful enough for yourself, let alone their relatives.

With such serious accidents enforcements agencies will be drawn in and may involve the police and certainly the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) or local assessors. An inquiry will begin that can take up loads of resources and time.

Succeeding this the regulator can carry out prosecution, which could lead to imprisonment of specific managers or directors, fines and prosecutions.

Think about some of the impacts on your organisation - they will include:

- Examination into the incident

- Reduced or delayed production

- Bigger insurance premiums

- Substituting the employee

Don't forget about the press. How do you cope with the local publicity and TV outlets that learn about the incident? How do you think the clients will respond? How would potential and present customers, the public, clients and staff, feel about your business?

So we can see from this that there are three main reasons for managing safely - these are:

1) Financial

2) Financial

3) Legal

Let's view these each in more depth.

Legal Reasons

Managing health and safety at work is not an optional activity. It is mandated by criminal law and any employer who fails to comply is exposed to very significant legal risks - both at an organisational and an individual level. Directors and employees can and do go to prison for health and safety breaches and significant fines are handed out.

Moral Motives

There are apparent moral reasons for good safety. To be safe and in good health is everyone's 1 major right. Yet, lots of staff and members of the public are killed or considerably injured annually due to the activities of companies over a wide scope of industries.

Price of Accidents

Poor health and accidents in the working environment are high in cost and are a huge, often not seen, causation of lower revenue. Costs are often indirect and also direct. These financial losses may be uninsured or saved by insurance. No matter, companies affected will eventually have to pay the price in total within a period.

With this in mind, an collection of statistics by the health and safety executive (HSE) saw that direct costs were thirty six times less then indirect costs. So the immediate direct cost is only the beginning of the sum where a lot of the costs are unseen until you total up the other indirect costs. Let's have a review of the several different damages that employers are probable to confront when something goes wrong. The direct costs, that normally are covered, can be:

What are manager's responsibilities?

We know that managing safely is fundamental - so what precisely are manager's accountable for?

You are in the foreground of health and safety if you are an employer. As an employee of your company, it is your duty to make sure choices about safety in your area are dealt with. You are the one who decides what takes place in your department.

Obligation leads to accountability - as a manager you must give those employers who work for you several tasks which they are responsible for, but you are ultimately the employee who shall be held responsible.

Let us revisit our scenario from the top, when we requested you to contemplate about a severe accident ensuring within your workplace. Position yourself in the place of the employer whose staff member was injured.

* It is your duty to inform your worker's family that they will not be home that day.

* It is therefore your job to schedule replacement labour, carry out an investigation into the accident, let customers know that their orders will be delayed, interact with law enforcement, and speak with the insurance company and any media.

* It is your task to let your worker's family know that they won't be coming home.

These are evidently very fundamental management duties. Basically, there is no other work that you will do that is more imperative than guaranteeing that all workers leave work safely.




About the Author:



Không có nhận xét nào:

Đăng nhận xét