Not all concerns are a case of "the iceman cometh"!

I’m writing this as our boiler and heating are being fixed.

The boiler went just suddenly one Sunday morning.? No warning, no irritable clanking or concerning banging.? Just no hot water or heating.

It wouldn’t re-pressurise or show any interest whatsoever.? Just gone.

Then, the weather turned cold.? Not as cold as it has been in some places, of course (as we’re down on the south coast of England), but it’s not nice when things grow cold in winter and you don’t have any heating.

Ice puns galore from Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in Batman & Robin (1997)

Cue electric heaters and hot water bottles.? The heaters had to go off at night, of course, because they’d be a fire hazard otherwise, and the hot water bottles invariably went cold and left our toes freezing in the middle of the night (even with two pairs of socks on).

Some great plumbers – and they were great, I’m not exaggerating – came around and diagnosed the problem: we had sludge in our radiators that had backed up and blocked the boiler.? Ewww!

All of this made a significant change to the day-to-day way of doing things:-

• As I’ve described above, we had temporary heating in place to substitute for the central heating (as much as it could).
• We then had to relocate from room to room during this time as the plumbers replaced the boiler and began de-sludging the radiators, with a particular focus on maximising the heat in one room, again where possible.

Fortunately, the repair work took place over half term, when many of my clients had switched their focus onto other pursuits…

It feels slightly like trying to wriggle off the hook to say that, as I’m not the property owner, the responsibility for maintaining the central heating system was not mine, as the truth is that we had ALL noticed that the radiators had been growing steadily colder over the years.? I couldn’t make the financial decision to get the radiators and the boiler serviced, but I could report my concerns up the chain of command, if you like.

Perhaps you’re starting to see where this instalment is going?

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gets the cold shoulder in The Shining (1980)

Taking this back to the workplace, yes, there is an element of “the law says we have to have this” when it comes to having policies and procedures in place, but hopefully the above illustrates how having policies and procedures in place can actually help your business to run more efficiently as well?

If I haven’t convinced you yet, then let me take you on a comparative journey that affects workplaces.

A loved one of mine has been in hospital several times in the past five months and not always in the same hospital (I won’t say who, what, where or why, because it relates to that person’s personal data and their sensitive personal data, none of which is for me to share…again, there’s a business and employment law lesson in my approach to that).?

On two of the occasions when they were admitted to hospital, the boilers at the hospitals broke down, affecting not only the staff, but the patients as well, of course.? After all, it is a key part of the existence of any hospital that it is there to provide care, so having proper and functioning amenities such as heating is essential.

The lack of heating not only affects the staff, but the ability to care for the patients, not only for the illnesses and conditions that they have come to the hospital to have treated, but also for anything else that might be picked up by not having the heating available.

Had the heating issues been ignored on either occasion in either hospital, I’m sure that a worker (meaning either an employee or a worker, for these purposes) would have had something to say about it, which could well have been a disclosure made in the public interest – what is known as a “protected disclosure” or "whistleblowing" (for the purposes of this article, I’ll just call it whistleblowing) – in this instance, because it is something that could affect staff and members of the public (both patients and visitors) using a public service, most obviously in terms of their health and safety.

Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) returns to the boiler room in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Now, you might think that I’m speaking exclusively about public services, but that’s not the case.? It extends to private organisations as well, because private organisations can have an impact on the public (as much as public organisations) and, if concerns are raised for genuine reasons, then the likelihood increases that this will be whistleblowing.

The question then turns to how you would know whether a concern is being raised for genuine reasons.

Well, sadly, the fact is that you don’t.? You might assume that someone is raising concerns for the wrong reasons, but that isn’t the same as having something definite to prove it.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, we move on to actually considering the concerns, even if there is no truth to them or they are thought to be untrue.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and Keith Jennings (David Warner) get to the root of Robert's concerns, no matter how upsetting it might be for Robert, in The Omen (1976)

This might sound like a lot of hard work for the wrong reasons, but:-

1. Depending on the nature of the concerns, it does not need to be a massive effort for you, if you are willing to look into the concerns in a genuine and honest manner.? (After all, it could be something as simple as proving your existing qualifications and/or accreditations or, returning to the hospital example, proving that the problem has not been ignored, and that something is being done or that steps are being taken to correct or improve something.)
2. If you care about the product or service that you are providing, then demonstrating that it is a good product or service surely shouldn’t be an uphill struggle – it’s just good customer service and can help to reassure the concerned worker about the strength of your product, services and brand so that they can demonstrate it to others.

The Magnavolt Salesman (John Glover) in RoboCop 2 (1990)

As you can see, we’ve come a long way from de-sludging a central heating system, to the law and how it can actually serve your business and your customers’ needs.

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