Training operatives in health and safety matters in the workplace such as construction was seen as a time consuming, costly, disruption to operations and an added expense that brought little benefit to an organisation – an investment without payback.

But in recent times that assumption is wrong and has been proven incorrect. Unfortunately, year on year, employees in the construction industry are injured through accidents that could so easily have been avoided through a little basic training in health and safety matters.

The benefits of health and safety training in a construction environment are many, providing benefits for the employer, but more importantly, benefits for the employee – the person most at risk.

Initially spending a short time discussing health and safety matters during an employee induction is the best first step towards maintaining a low accident rate and keeping lost man hours through sickness and injury to a minimum. Insurance companies look preferably towards employers who take health and safety matters seriously and premium rates will often reflect this.

Risks Exist in Every Workplace

Contractors must follow the rules of the health and safety at work act of 1974 and have a duty of care for employees and all visitors on work site. As a consequence, contractors must carry out detailed risk assessments of all work areas and processes, and record these findings. If any significant risks are identified then measures must be put in place to reduce these risks.

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All risk assessments must be recorded with actions agreed to control in a timely manner to minimise identified risks. All employees must be notified of risks and any procedures or methods implemented to ensure personal safety, including the use of protective equipment.

Health and Safety Training – The First Step

Many construction companies carry out induction training for new operatives on their first day of project work, to discuss and impart information not always covered during interview stage. It is here that very often the rule book will be issued, with its finer details explained for clarity and understanding. Points covered during induction might include:

i). How and when wages are paid
ii). Lines of authority and communication
iii). Explanation of site evacuation process
iv). What to do in the event of sickness or absentee from work
v). How to report an accident or near miss incident at work
vi). Disciplinary procedures

The above list is far from complete – induction training will generally involve a thorough explanation of the employee’s duties and responsibilities, including any associated safety risks.

Checklists are Quick and Easy

Checklists are a quick and easy way to cover relevant health and safety issues at employee induction training – a single sheet containing numerically listed points of interest will often suffice for this purpose.

The company representative carrying out the induction will bring the employee’s attention to relevant health and safety issues, one by one. A health and safety induction record may include some of the following important issues that the employee should be familiar with;

i). Site evacuation procedure
ii). Risks associated with the employee’s working environment and duties
iii). Fire precautions and location of fire fighting equipment
iv). Safe manual handling and use of specific equipment and machinery
v). Accident and near miss reporting
vi). The importance of personal protective equipment
vii). Any health monitoring carried out by the employer

Again, this list is by no means complete. A health and safety checklist should be with organised with right thoughts and consideration and should include all processes and activities carried out by the operatives on a construction site.

Following review and completion of the induction checklist, the employer should verify the employee understands each and all points discussed and should sign the document to confirm understanding. This document is important and should be stored in a controlled manner within individual employee files. It could prove an invaluable document at a later date.

Health and Safety Training and E-Learning

Health and safety induction training can be done online, but the trainer will need some kind of training in order to adequately and efficiently carry out these important duties. Many organisations will appoint a specialist in health and safety training needs to conduct it. The trend toward online induction training is on the increase due to its flexibility and self driven pace of learning. Online induction training is very cost & time effective for the employers or main contractors.

Lost man hours, loss of production, and increases in insurance premiums can all result due to neglecting health and safety training in the workplace. Litigation and compensation claims could easily arise sometime in the future. Training employees in health and safety at induction is only the first step toward ensuring a safe working environment.

Mosaic provides unique competency management system that has the ability to provide one solution to factors such HR and health & safety consultancy, occupational health, online induction and training.To register your interest or know more about how Mosaic can transform your operational processes, please call us on 01509 269669 or visit: mosaicmanagementsystems.co.uk.

Source: HSE.gov.uk

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Stock Management is about knowing what you have in your warehouse and where your stock is located. However, unless it’s integrated with your back-office systems, a stock management system alone can’t effectively optimise your stock, nor ensure the stock asset value on your financial reports matches what is physically in stock—at least not without manual intervention and reconciliation.

To optimise stock management, leading companies integrate their stock management software directly with back-office and accounting systems. This integration provides a competitive edge with abilities to plan effectively, execute predictably with customers and minimise labour costs and errors associated with manual reconciliation.

Determining the right stock management system for your business and a strategy for back-office integration requires assessing your needs today and your plans for future growth.

To achieve maximum benefits, your integrated solution must be real-time, flexible, transparent to users, reconcilable and scalable.

Why integrate Stock Management software with your back office?

The three key benefits to integrating your stock management software with your back-office systems are:

• Optimising stock to meet product availability and ROI goals
• Providing stock visibility to supply chain partners
• Stating stock accurately in financial reports

Although there are other benefits of integration between stock and back-office systems, these three can provide significant impact to your company’s bottom line.

Activities such as storing, counting and reworking stock tie up additional working capital, and potentially reduce the availability of the required stock. Planning the right level and amount of inventory requires your sales order, purchase order and planning systems to have real-time visibility of your inventory.

Many companies are using supply chain partners to manage their stock levels and customer shipments. To do so effectively, the stock management system must be integrated not only with the company’s back office systems, but also with supplier or third-party logistics, systems. By seeing your company’s fluctuating stock levels, suppliers can ensure their product is available at your warehouse when needed.

Stock value can be a significant portion of your stated assets and the recorded value in your books must match the physical value in your warehouse. The only effective way to ensure financial integrity in your company reporting is to integrate the transactions in your inventory system with your back-office chart of accounts.

What’s Important in the Integration

Inventory and back-office system integration must be real-time, flexible, transparent to users, reconcilable and scalable. Being real-time provides the best visibility and ensures that your financial reports are always up to date and accurate in regards to the stock.

Users want the integration to be flexible and transparent, as continuous changes in business processes may require adjustments to the integration. Users don’t want to have to think about the integration, they just want it to work! Scalability is sometimes forgotten about during the integration design, but if neglected it will come back to haunt you when your company’s success overloads it with high stock transaction volumes.

The Path to Integration

The easiest way to achieve the integration objectives and criteria we’ve discussed is to have an ERP system like Mosaic Management Systems with a stock management module that meets your needs. If this is not feasible, the next best solution is finding an inventory system and an ERP system that were both designed from the ground up with open and flexible APIs.

Mosaic manages construction plant/assets and allows stock to be checked on site using RFID, Smart Cards and or PDAs to monitor the movement of equipment, materials and PPE. Any item that is issued on site, whether it is owned or hired from a third party, can be inputted into the stock control system easily.

In addition, the system provides a comprehensive and accurate picture of who has both the appropriate training and permissions to use various stock items.

 

Considering the scope and complexity of the construction sector and the statistics relating to the number of incidents, accidents, fatalities and ill health, there is no doubt that the effective management of health and safety risks for workers should be highlighted.

This is one of the main health and safety challenges that the construction sector faces. Evidence proves that a number of accidents and ill-health situations have occurred because of poor management of such risks by employers, especially in the construction sector where the nature of risk is very complex, with various on site activities going on, often at the same time.

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According to a recent health and safety article published, the rise in injuries on construction sites last year is because of lack of adequate training and instruction for workers and is an increasingly common factor in health and safety prosecutions.

Some of the causal factors that could lead to unplanned or unwanted incidents involving workers are lack of health and safety awareness, poor communication levels, risk perceptions, cultural and religious differences, poorer skill sets, attitudes, level of supervision and pressure from managers, among others.

Employers that engage new workers on site need to ensure sufficient and suitable risk control measures, both preventive and remedial, are on site and proportional to the risks posed by new operatives. A suitable risk assessment of the individual worker should be carried out to ascertain the level of risks faced by them. Failure to pay special attention to new set of workers leaves them more vulnerable to risks and invariably could become an accident waiting to happen.

The outcome of individual risk assessments will enable a planned and safe system of work to be put in place, which will take care of individual circumstances. HSE states that it is unquestionable that new employees, especially the self-employed and agency workers, are generally more exposed to risk than others who have been in the workplace for a year and beyond.

Managing the health and safety risks of workers starts by carrying out a risk assessment that takes into account the needs of each individual. It should be adequate enough to deal with all risk factors and should be reviewed regularly to take on board any vital changes that make be required. Prior to engaging workers with any training, it is essential that employers resolve some of the issues that could affect how an operative can work safely on site.

Apart from the aforementioned risks faced, some functional skills such as numerical and literacy, level of health and safety awareness, competences in relation to the job and relevant work experience should be assessed as well. Clearly, any worker who possesses the ‘required’ functional skills will be more valued.

A good level of literacy alongside the ability to read and understand relevant language used in a workplace is vital to risk communication. Risk communication is an important tool in health and safety management. To achieve effective risk communication, the employees cannot afford not to be able to read and understand simple health and safety words and signs used to convey safety information in the workplace. The vulnerability of such workers is increased by their inability to communicate.

 

 

Sometimes a non-English speaking worker will find it difficult to understand safety briefings, toolbox talks, method statements or safe systems of work. Identifying such deficiencies needs to be done during the induction process. It is crucial that at this point that employers should test the levels of health and safety awareness of the workers so that they can focus on what safety training is needed and to make any referrals if necessary.

The use of multilingual supervisors at work or even translators during induction, task briefings, safety briefings, and replacing written notices with symbols or diagrams will be very useful.  Teaming up inexperienced workers to teams with more experienced ones must be encouraged too. Failure to address these issues will leave any worker especially a non-English one vulnerable to risks, which could also affect others.

Competence is another crucial issue and it is vital that workers have the required skills, training, knowledge and experience. Having all of these enables any worker to carry out his job more safely and invariably helps to raise and maintain safety standards.

Employers should check competence cards or qualifications with appropriate accreditation agencies to confirm authenticity and make sure they can be matched with the required standard. Where there is a gap, supplementary training should be recommended. Frequent supervision is also advised so that managers can spot any areas for improvement.

Important and correct measures must be taken to make sure accidents and fatal incidents are avoided at work. If the employers don’t allow their projects to be run on a safe & secured competency system such as Mosaic Management Systems, then they are putting their businesses, themselves and their workers in serious jeopardy.

 

One of the most at-risk groups when it comes to the potential for accidents or incidents are new starters at the place of work. This can be new starters or existing employees moving within the company.

The category of ‘new starters’ can be further broken down into people who already have experience of working in the particular industry, or young people who have little to no experience of working either in any workplace, or in the particular environment they now find themselves in, for example an apprentice working on a construction site as their very first taste of work since leaving college.

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Induction training is particularly important for young new starters as they will in all likelihood not have received any formal work related training before.

In respect to the construction industry, when an operative first starts on a new project, he/she needs to have proper induction training which will make him/her aware of the work, what is required of him, specific risks, dangers and hazards that are present or may be encountered whilst going about their duties in their new role. Not only is there a risk of an accident or incident befalling them personally, but they also need to know how to work safely to avoid endangering a fellow worker or member of the public who may be nearby or visiting the premises.

Induction training is not only in the interests of the company itself, either from a moral or financial point of view (compensation claims or lost days can be extremely expensive to the firm), but employers also have a legal requirement to ensure workers are given proper introduction to work training, especially a health & safety induction.

Using industry standard competency and compliance software will help provide employers with the right induction management tools to ensure the training is done in a more productive and structured way than ever before. Mosaic Management Systems provide a competency model which completely streamlines the induction process, by allowing inductees to book themselves onto the inductions prior to coming on site.

Mosaic provides the required tools that are essential in ensuring that site workers are qualified for the jobs they are performing.

To register your interest or know more about how Mosaic can transform your operational processes, please call us on 01509 269669 or visit: mosaicmanagementsystems.co.uk.