Maintaining a healthy workplace

Home

Members

Services

News & Info

Entertainment

Help

Content Starts Here

Maintaining a healthy workplace

Sickness is bad news for any company but it can prove fatal for a small business. Ill health might mean you fail to deliver an order and could even lose a customer. An accident or poor attendance record will also damage your reputation.

A high rate of days lost through sickness can hit productivity and morale. If the sickness is due to accidents at work you could face prosecution, legal costs and fines. If you're prosecuted under environmental legislation you might face clean-up costs.

Although insurance may cover part of the cost of an accident you will still have to foot part of the bill and your premium will rise afterwards.

Research shows that having a job is usually good for our health but, according to the Choosing Health White Paper, two million people think that they have an illness caused - or made worse - by their work.

If your staff turnover is high or you are losing more days to sickness perhaps you should ask yourself just how healthy your workplace really is.

The dangers of an unhealthy workplace

Workplace Health Connect, a government-funded service that provides confidential and free advice to small business on issues such as workplace health and safety, says the main risks are:

Asthma - there are 7,000 cases of work-related asthma a year and the figure is growing
Back pain - in 2003/04 nearly 5 million working days were lost due to back pain caused or made worse by work
Dermatitis: there's around 8,400 new cases of work-related dermatitis each year
Falls from heights (the biggest workplace killer) - in 2004/05 falls lead to 53 deaths and nearly 4,000 major injuries. Slips and trips are the biggest cause of major injuries at work
Noise: over 170,000 people in Britain suffer deafness and other ear conditions due to excessive noise at work
Stress led to an estimated 10.8 million days lost in 2005/06
Vehicle accidents caused 60 deaths and 1,800 major injuries last year
Vibration - about 9 million workers in Great Britain are exposed to Whole Body Vibration

ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) stresses that you can only make your workplace healthy if you take a long-term approach to health and safety issues.

Employers should make a thorough assessment of workplace hazards, introduce controls and monitor whether they are successful or not.

The Government's one-stop advice website for small businesses, Business Link offers a questionnaires to help small businesses find out how healthy there workplace is and ways of benchmarking their provision against similar organisations.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE)'s website (http://www.hse.gov.uk/smallbusinesses/gettingstarted.htm) includes advice about how to carry out a risk assessment.

Identify the hazards. Walk round your workplace, talk to staff, ask HSE for advice, check manufacturers' instructions
Decide who might be harmed and how. Remember to include staff working in other places (for example at home or 'on the road'), suppliers, members of the public or clients and employees with special needs
Evaluate the risks and decide on precautions. Compare what you are doing already with best practice and list what needs to be done
Record your findings and implement them. Tackle high-risk dangers first
Review your risk assessment and update if necessary. Few workplaces stay the same. Put a date in your diary for the next assessment as soon as you complete the last

The Health and Safety at Work Act (HSW Act) puts a duty on all employers with five or more employees to produce a written health and safety policy.

HSE recommends that your policy should define who does what, when and how they do it. You can find an example of a simple health and safety policy on the HSE website that you can fill in and keep at your workplace.

Ensure that employees and their representatives, typically trade unions, understand measures to help everyone work safely.

ACAS urges employers to listen to employees who may have useful suggestions about how to improve safety. If you do have an accident or incident make sure it is fully investigated and measures taken to stop something similar happening again.

Although your main priority should be to keep staff safe there are other ways to improve general wellbeing and reduce stress. Some employers are able to offer health perks such as an eyesight and hearing check-up.

While this may be too expensive for most small businesses you might be able to arrange for a fitness instructor or yoga teacher to hold classes for your staff or negotiate a special rate at a local gym.

Workplace Health Connect www.workplacehealthconnect.co.uk
Health & Safety Executive www.hse.gov.uk
ACAS www.acas.org.uk
Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (ROSPA) www.rospa.co.uk