Health & Safety should form the backbone of business operations and run through everything it does. How can a business achieve this?
Vertas Group Limited
People 'Making the Difference' in catering, cleaning, security, energy, property, grounds, environmental and design.
In this article, Kelly Fellowes , our Associate Director of HSQE C&G discusses why health and safety should form the backbone of business operations and how it should be embraced and filtered through at every level.
At Vertas Group the health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues influences every decision we make and is a fundamental thread that runs throughout the organisation. I like to call it the golden thread, because our colleagues are at the heart of everything we do. Building a strong health and safety culture is integral to any business, as it affects all aspects of an organisation.
It’s not just about being compliant. We want our colleagues to have everything they need to do their jobs effectively and safely. Good health and safety management is essential for everything we do and everything we touch. We need to shake off the preconceptions that health and safety is longwinded or boring – we’re there to help and support and make everyone’s jobs easier where possible.
At Vertas, we have developed our new ‘Making the Difference Safely’ strategy – a health, safety and wellbeing strategy to engage colleagues, deliver a safer and healthier work environment, and to encourage and enable a positive, sustainable, safety culture. Our strategy hinges on our four key SAFE objectives – Simplicity, Accountability, Family and Excellence – which are driven by our corporate values and provide the strategic direction for continuous improvement and business growth.
Firstly, to engage colleagues, we aim to make health and safety as simple, fun and efficient as possible. We have over 4,000 colleagues who are busy Making the Difference in their jobs, so they need information at their fingertips; we don’t want them wading through lots of long and complicated documents. As a result, we are working to continually improve our award-winning Integrated Management System to keep it relevant, simple and easy to use, providing a structured induction and onboarding process, and quick e-learning modules so that everyone has the training to do their job safely. To ensure all employees have easy access to the health and safety training and information they need, we use different ways to communicate – from our monthly newsletter ‘Dialogue’, emails, safety alerts and e-learning, to YouTube videos. We’ve also just launched an innovative employee app, which is an easy and effective way to communicate with our teams.
Every individual is responsible for effective health and safety management in the workplace. As Professor Tim Marsh states, everyone is a ‘Safety Leader’. If you’re working safely and doing things correctly, this will rub off on colleagues you are working with. Everyone knows what’s right and wrong. Accidents happen when people aren’t doing the right thing. But ensuring things are done the right way isn’t about sitting in the office and making up procedures. We need to communicate with the experts out in the field, to make sure they have everything they need to do their jobs.
We have an amazing and passionate HSQE team that supports our colleagues across the organisation with system developments, site visits, auditing and training as and when required. It’s vital for organisations to engage with their teams and understand their roles and the tasks that they undertake on a day-to-day basis. When we see things that could be done better on site, we either try and fix them there and then or get things underway to find solutions for them.
Our colleagues understand how taking care of their own health and safety can have an effect on people around them. Everyone has a role to play to ensure that they co-operate and correctly apply safe working procedures for their own, and everyone else’s safety and welfare. To encourage this, we have now launched our new ‘SAFE reporting’, which can all be done online, making it easier for colleagues to report incidents, accidents, near misses and hazards when found on site. We also run the ‘near miss of the month’ competition, so if a colleague sees a near miss or a hazard, they report it and are in with a chance of winning ￡10 voucher. Using incentives like that helps promote the importance proactively reporting health and safety issues, acknowledges their commitment and gives a fun reward when they’ve found something wrong and fixed it or prevented an incident.
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It’s engrained in our work culture to consistently reduce the risks to our Vertas Family so they can be safe, be sure, be healthy, and return home safely to their loved ones every day. In 2021, Vertas Group was recognised as a world leader for its excellent Health & Safety standards when it achieved the RoSPA award in the Facilities Management Sector. Being awarded the highest possible accolade in the UK’s longest-running health and safety industry awards highlights our commitment to health, safety and wellbeing throughout the group. With regular training, communication and good practice, we inspire an excellent health and safety culture and are continually looking for new ways to improve.
The importance of emphasising health and safety in any business runs much deeper than the legal duties to ensure safety at work. As well as reducing accidents, it’s vital for an organisation’s reputation and productivity, to look after their work force passionately. Failure to suitably control health and safety risks can result in accidents, fines, prosecution, higher insurance costs and damage to a business’ reputation. Retaining colleagues by looking after them, having fewer employees off due to injury and saving money, all have a positive impact on colleagues and on your business. Without our amazing colleagues we wouldn’t be able to provide the services that we do, so we need to make sure we can keep them safe while carrying out their jobs. You can keep up to date with the latest Health & Safety guidance and advice through some of the following links.