How to approach employees not following the safety rules and improve safety culture

Let’s set the scene.

Senior company executives are concerned that their sites aren’t being managed effectively and want to know what can be done to improve safety performance and develop the organisational safety culture.

It’s a busy construction site in the middle of the city centre, and employees are using noisy tools and equipment that creates dust, working from Stepladders, Scaffolding Towers, and the PPE provided to protect their health and welfare is not being worn, and the site rules are not being followed properly – Get the picture? Okay.

My immediate question is, “Why and how are these employees allowed to work in this manner?”

And my next question is, “At what point did the employees decide to work at risk and what were their reasons for this behaviour?”

What works for me

When engaging with the employees, I would approach them, introduce who I was, and ask them to talk me through what they were doing. I would ask about their background (where the employee is from, family, hobbies, etc.).

Next, I would ask about how long they have been working for the company and how long they have been on the site. Then I would ask about their co-workers to get an insight from their point of view.

I would also ask about their supervisor/manager to understand their relationships. And after getting to know them a bit more. I’d ask the employees about “near miss reporting” and what that would mean to them.

Unless there was an imminent danger to an employee… I would not address the PPE issues or the site rules directly with an individual. I would end the conversations there with the entire team.

Onto the management

Next, I would have a private conversation with the site manager/supervisor to understand their knowledge of and relationship with the employees and their knowledge of the company policy, site rules and procedures.

Part of that conversation is to bring to the manager’s/supervisors’ attention the at-risk observations and employees’ concerns, discuss safety coaching techniques that can help improve the organisational safety culture – and provide them with a leadership development opportunity and strategy to engage the employees, correct the issues, and lead.

Finally, followed by a feedback session with the senior executives to discuss the findings and the solutions offered, how these would work in practice, encourage them to get involved and commit to a continuous safety improvement program.

Does that sound interesting to you?

When you’re ready to improve your organisational safety culture with coaching and strategy get in touch using the contact form below.

Mental Health At Work: How Can Managers Protect Employee Mental Health?

Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in risk assessments and other everyday health and safety management that we forget about the people involved.

H&S isn’t just about avoiding physical injury. The goal is to ensure the health and wellbeing of everyone onsite, to ensure they can do their job without risk or discomfort to themselves or others – this includes mental health.

In just a few short years, we’ve come a long way regarding mental health at work, but we still have a long way to go. One in four people in the UK will have a mental health problem at some point in their lives, potentially triggered or exacerbated by work.

Managers should be putting as much emphasis on mental health as they do on physical health if they want to achieve a truly effective health and safety culture.

Do employers have a legal obligation to protect the mental health of workers?

For a start, it’s worth highlighting that any business satisfied with doing the bare minimum the law requires probably isn’t all that bothered about their health and safety. However, it’s good for managers to refresh their knowledge of the law every so often to ensure they’re still on the up and up, no matter how invested they are in risk management.

The simple answer is that employers have a legal responsibility to ensure workers are not working under undue stress or pressure.

Anxiety and depression, the two most common mental health issues, can be triggered by issues at work. Over time, without treatment, stress at work can lead to physical and psychological damage.

That’s not good for the employee or the employer. It can lead to absenteeism, reduced productivity, and even physical harm due to distraction or exhaustion.

No matter whether work is causing the issue or exacerbating an existing issue, employers are legally required under legislation to manage it as they would any other risk.

According to the HSE: ‘Work-related mental health issues must be assessed to measure the levels of risk to staff. Where a risk is identified, steps must be taken to remove it or reduce it as far as reasonably practicable.’

Employers may also find that they have additional legal requirements under other legislation to protect workers’ mental health, such as equalities legislation.

The fact is that the HSE views mental health as no less important than physical health and expects employers to act accordingly.

What can employers do to protect the mental health of employees?

In 2017, the government commissioned the ‘Thriving at Work’ report, which laid out a framework of actions that employers and risk managers should implement to protect the mental health of workers. These guidelines state that employers must:

Produce, implement and communicate a mental health at work plan which promotes good mental health for all employees and clearly outlines the support available for those who want or need it
Develop mental health awareness among employees by making information, tools, and support accessible
Encourage open conversations about mental health and support available, from recruitment and at regular intervals. Employees should be offered appropriate workplace adjustments if needed
Provide employees with good working conditions and ensure they have a healthy work/life balance, as well as opportunities for development
Promote effective people management to ensure all employees have regular conversations about their health and wellbeing with managers, supervisors, or leaders, and train and support managers to effectively manage mental health issues
Monitor employee mental health and wellbeing based on available data, talk to employees and understand risk factors

What these very in-depth guidelines boil down to is this:

Have a mental health plan
Promote communication and open conversations about mental health by raising awareness and reducing stigma
Implement a way to monitor actions and outcomes to inform future decisions

Another set of HSE Guidelines, the Management Standards, also includes a framework for managers to manage mental health at work better.

You can read more here.

What does this mean in practice?

Like most things in health and safety, managing mental health at work comes down to treating your employees like people, not statistics.

Those responsible for managing risks must be aware of who is working onsite, not just as a name on a clipboard, but as a person.

This is perhaps even more crucial when it comes to mental health. Often, safety managers can identify physical risks from a standard visual inspection and tackle them then and there. Unfortunately, mental health is very personal, and too many suffer in silence or fall through the cracks. Symptoms might not begin to show until it’s too late.

By treating employees as people and regularly talking with them person-to-person rather than communicating through PowerPoint, you can more easily identify struggling employees and provide the help and support they need.

Managers should also strive to ensure psychological safety onsite. Employees must feel comfortable coming forward with physical or mental issues without fear of reproach or punishment.

If an employee is not certain they can safely bring issues to your attention, they won’t, and the problem will continue to fester until something goes very wrong.

Fundamentally, suppose the employee’s mental health is impacted by work, such as poor management, excessive workload, or bullying. In that case, immediate action should be taken to remove or remedy the trigger.

Just as employees should not be expected to work under the threat of physical harm, no employee should be expected to do a job that harms their mental health.

Get in touch today via the contact form below to learn more about how better to manage people and mental health issues at work or discuss your health and safety needs.

Coach, Don’t Manage: Working Together For A Healthier Safety Culture

If you’ve ever read my blog or seen one of my posts on LinkedIn, you’ll know that I firmly believe in coaching, not managing. But what do I actually mean by this?

I am a big advocate of honest, open communication in the workplace, no matter your role because I know it can make or break a business. This goes double for those responsible for safety, as communication can often be the difference between life or death.

Long gone are the days when it was fine for safety managers to walk around, clipboard in hand, shouting orders and telling people off for not wearing their hard hats. To have any impact, these managers should instead be asking themselves why that person wasn’t wearing their hard hat in the first place.

Coaching comes in; a more diplomatic, empathic way of doing things to get the best out of your team.

However, I know this management style doesn’t always come easily. The good news is that these skills can be learnt, and with an open mind and a willingness to change, safety managers can shift the way they do things and ensure a safer workplace.

Change things up

Sometimes, when things don’t seem to be working, a change in mindset is all it takes.

Empowering people to reach their conclusion, make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions can be far more effective than telling them the answer.

Rather than drilling the ‘right’ answer into employees, managers should be focused on empowering others to make their own reasoned choices and make daily safety tasks subconscious.

This subverts the idea that employees should ‘do as they’re told and instead equips them with the ability to act independently and dynamically, freeing managers to take a more effective big picture approach rather than getting bogged down in the day-to-day.

Get to know your people.

I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t know who your people are, what makes them tick, and their ‘why’, your efforts will always be in vain.

Everyone is different and has their reasons for doing what they do, and something that works for one person will not work for another. This is why cut and paste safety briefings are so ineffective.

You will never learn anything about your team by locking yourself in an office and waiting for them to ask for help. Showing you care, engaging with colleagues, asking questions – not just about the workplace but about their lives too – and offering guidance is a far more effective strategy.

Take time to walk and talk with co-workers and keep them up to date with developments. It shows that you care about them as people can work miracles though it takes commitment and patience.

Your involvement and genuine interest in who they are will result in an engaged team that will want to work with you and take your advice on board. Building relationships is a superpower that not enough managers take advantage of.

Ensure your employees have the information they need

As a safety manager, it is your responsibility to make sure that colleagues have access to the latest safety regulations and procedures and the relevant training that will help them build a stronger safety culture together.

This sounds easier said than done, however. We all know how easy it is to throw a few PowerPoint presentations together and call it ‘safety training’. But unfortunately, such training is rarely put together with the worker in mind, and most workers will zone out before they take it in.

When putting together training materials, you should know who your audience is, their pain points, and which training method they’ll respond to best. Don’t overwhelm them with things they don’t need to know.

By giving employees relevant information and training so that they can put it into practice, you’ll be equipping them to respond to situations safely and dynamically, ultimately reducing the time and financial cost of micro-managing.

Show, don’t tell

Think about coaching this way: you are like a parent who needs to teach their children the life skills they need to figure out how to do things independently. Although it feels more straightforward and quicker to tell someone exactly what to do and how to do it, you’re just creating further problems down the line.

With this method, you’ll more than likely have to give specific instructions repeatedly. This is unpleasant and frustrating for everyone involved: no one likes being told what to do, especially repeatedly. They’ll tune out.

Micromanaging people discourages initiative, engagement, and taking responsibility for one’s actions.

Instead, here are a few things you should focus on:

First, listen to what your team says and learn their pain points. Listening will help you come up with more helpful solutions.
Ask open questions, don’t just assume things – if you need more information or clarification, don’t be afraid to ask. Similarly, some individuals find it difficult to express their concerns or might not know where to start in conversations. But, again, asking the right questions can lead to a more fruitful discussion.
Give feedback. This is essential for improvement as it helps things move along. Focus on constructive feedback.
Show empathy. When we struggle or make mistakes, being shown empathy helps us unblock, move on, and learn. Showing empathy will help guide your team out of the slump and closer to your desired goal.

Use mistakes as learning opportunities.

Everyone makes mistakes. The safety industry itself was built on learning from our mistakes, so it’s only fair to continue to use mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failings.

No one wants accidents to happen, but when they do, your goal is to understand why the incident happened and work with the people involved to prevent it from happening again.

As a safety manager, you need to accept that mistakes happen. However, you should also do your best to use them as learning opportunities rather than automatically resorting to discipline.

If the same person continues to make the same mistakes, there is probably a bigger issue. Perhaps the person does not fit into your safety culture. But if it’s the first time, you have a golden opportunity to look at the circumstances around the incident and work with the person to make sure it does not happen again.

As a safety coach, your goal should always be to work with people towards better safety practices, not against them.

Keep investing in yourself.

As with any skill, practice makes perfect, which goes for coaching. No one is born a brilliant coach, and there should be no shame in admitting that you need improvement.

Many managers might not even be aware that they lack skills, and some might even think they are great coaches when the reality is different. As coaches and leaders, we need to develop the kind of self-awareness that will help us improve.

Checking in from time to time, asking for feedback from teams or direct managers, and keeping up with training needs is paramount for building a successful career that helps people create safer workplaces.

Get advice from the experts.

I’ve spent the last two decades working closely with safety managers and supervisors to teach them the skills they need to help develop their people and get the best out of them, ultimately ensuring a safer environment.

If you think you might benefit from learning the skills to be more coach-like, get in touch.

Replacing Paperwork With Peoplework: How To Engage Employees With Safety

Health and safety management can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle. Although most people understand that it plays an important part in keeping us safe, when there are a million things to do and little time to do them, it can easily fall by the wayside.

This is particularly frustrating for health and safety managers, who invest their time and effort into creating comprehensive safety processes to protect workers, only for employees to ignore them or cry ‘health and safety gone mad!’

That said, sometimes health and safety management can be ineffective not because employees aren’t willing to engage with it but because it’s not designed to be engaged with. Unfortunately, too many managers are clinging to the old ways of clipboards, official notices, and hundred-page Powerpoints.

Of course, this information is usually crucial: safety managers must communicate processes to employees. But, let’s be honest, no one really benefits from hour-long lectures on proper hi-viz usage or a fly-by clipboard assault because they forgot to reverse into a parking space that morning.

Instead, if safety managers want to see real buy-in from employees, they need to step away from the paperwork and focus on people instead, with different methods of getting staff engaged with safety.

Peoplework, Not Paperwork

In my two decades as a safety consultant, I’ve consistently extolled the virtues to my clients of seeing employees not as statistics but as people.

The Human Factor is one of the most unpredictable aspects of any safety process, as there are a million reasons why a person might act in an unsafe manner beyond laziness or malice. To overcome this, safety managers must understand their employees as people to better identify triggers for unsafe behaviour. You can read more about the Human Factor here.

By understanding – and communicating with – employees as people rather than numbers, you’ll find they are more willing to engage with your safety culture.

So, what are some of the best ways to ensure employees see health and safety as a benefit rather than a hindrance?

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement measures the dedication and commitment to your organisation. This goes beyond safety management and usually requires a culture where employees feel like their work is worthwhile and appreciated.

If employees are engaged, they are more likely to respond to and engage with the safety culture. With a personal interest in creating a safe place to work, they will make an effort to listen to safety managers and follow procedures at all times, not just when they are being watched.

To get employees to listen to what you’re saying, you need to go beyond the employees themselves and encourage those at a higher level to ensure everyone feels appreciated. The benefits of an engaged workforce go beyond safety culture, creating higher productivity levels, lower staff turnover, and more, and should be a priority for all businesses.

Seek Employee Input

Employee participation in safety is a crucial but often overlooked part of safety management. Fundamentally, people care more about something if they’ve had a hand in building it.

A great way to do this is by establishing Health and Safety Committees. Employees themselves take part in safety management and have real input in putting safety processes in place.

Health and Safety Committees are a powerful way to improve your safety processes. Although you might have an in-depth understanding of your own business, employees can bring a ground-level perspective and advise on safer and more efficient ways to carry out work.

In fact, Health and Safety Committees are now considered a basic requirement for any organisation seeking to achieve the ISO 45001 international safety standard.

It’s recommended that safety managers have minimal input in these committees to ensure a sense of ownership for employees and a more independent, official representation directly to management.

Acknowledge Employee Feedback

Not every employee has the time or inclination to be a part of a safety committee, but safety managers must make sure their input is still openly valued.

I have previously talked about psychological safety in the workplace and how important it is that employees feel comfortable bringing issues and potential safety failures to the top brass without fear of punishment. The last thing you want is an employee having a potentially fatal near miss, only to fail to report it because they’re expecting a black mark.

Crucially, when employees report potential safety failings, ensure you recognise their input and then immediately act on it. By not showing willingness to act on feedback, you’ll only serve to reduce the number of employees who think reporting is worthwhile.

Safety managers can’t be everywhere at once – and shouldn’t be – so creating a culture where employees feel listened to should be a priority for everyone.

Provide Relevant Training and Opportunites For Growth

You might think you’re already doing this quite well, but too many safety managers think they can get away with mandating a few online safety lessons a month and calling it a day. Not all training is relevant to every employee, and, let’s be honest, no one wants to sit at a computer watching a slew of safety videos from the 90s.

Again, this comes down to knowing your employees as people. By understanding each person as an individual, you can tailor training to them and provide opportunities for growth that actually appeal.

Work With People, Not Statistics

Once again, all this fundamentally comes down to leaving the clipboard in the office and actually engaging with the people who work in your business.

In reality, most people know that health and safety are there for their benefit. Still, it’s up to safety managers to portray safety in a way that emphasises and personalises these benefits to them.

I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses to create bespoke and effective safety cultures, and I can do the same for you. To find out more, drop me a message via the online form.

Making Your Safety Culture Subconscious

There are a wide variety of opinions when it comes to health and safety.

Some people think it’s a right royal pain, designed to make work harder and less efficient. Others – myself included – understand that health and safety is instead meant to protect workers, and instead encourage them to think about their safety at work and beyond.

Legal Obligation

No matter the opinion held, health and safety is unavoidable fact of professional life. Employers and employees are legally bound by a range of safety legislation, including the Health and Safety at Work Act, to ensure work is carried out safely and legally.

But let’s be honest, nobody likes being told what to do. ‘You have to do this because the government says so’ is hardly an effective rallying cry to get people on board.

The best way to sell the idea of health and safety, like everything, is on the benefits. This goes beyond employees’ physical safety, ranging from supporting mental well-being and more to increasing efficiency, reducing absenteeism, and even improving profits.

As much as we love toolbox talks, presentations, and bulletin board notices in health and safety, it can be challenging to get employees – and managers – to take health and safety on board, no matter how positively you spin it. Don’t get me wrong, these are crucial parts of the process but will only take you so far.

Before any process can be truly effective, it needs to become subconscious. So, for example, health and safety shouldn’t be something employees have to think hard about, but rather something they do, like a surgeon, washing their hands, or brushing their teeth in the morning.

So what can you do to make health and safety subconscious at work?

Understand Your Employees

Whenever I talk to clients about health and safety, I always bring up the Human Factor.

Here’s the thing. Right from when we’re born to the day we die, humans are fundamentally unpredictable. We might have our routines and favoured way of doing things, but there’s always a fine line between doing things a certain way and doing them entirely differently, depending on a range of factors.

It can be nearly impossible to predict which way we’ll go until it happens from the outside.

At work, this is even more obvious. No matter how effective or comprehensive your safety procedures are, you can’t guarantee employees will follow them. You can do safety briefings until you’re red in the face, but in the moment, it’s entirely likely your employees will choose to do things their way – whether due to arrogance or to save time – and everything falls apart.

A shocking report from Safety and Health Magazine says incident reports show that as many as 80% to 90% of serious injuries and accidents could be down to human behaviour.

So what can you do about it? I go into more detail in my blog about the Human Factor. Still, fundamentally, the only way to minimise this behaviour effectively is by understanding your employees as human beings rather than statistics and properly identifying the potential triggers of unwanted behaviour.

Once you have a more in-depth understanding of the people working for you and these triggers, you can more effectively communicate the safety message in a way they will respond to.

Start At The Top

For the most part, humans love to follow the leader. We’re suckers for trends and the latest fads because we like to feel like we’re part of the pack.

This is known as the ‘bandwagon effect’, and although ‘jumping on the bandwagon is sometimes used negatively, in the case of positive things such as health and safety, it can be a powerful tool.

The most effective way to start a bandwagon effect? Get those at the top invested in safety leadership coaching.

When employees see managers getting involved in health and safety and making a real effort to make it part of their day to day, they will want to do the same. If there is sufficient communication between upper management and employees, this positive reinforcement should trickle down and quickly become part of the culture.

For more information on just how effective safety leadership coaching can be, read my blog on the subject here

Make It Personal

Get rid of the faceless cartoons and stock photos in your safety training. Of course, this type of communication has its place, but the most effective way to get workers invested in safety is with a human focus, and better yet, a personal one.

Use real employees in your communications: people others know and recognise as friends or colleagues.

Emphasise just how important it is that people follow the rules to ensure their safety and the safety of others. The impact of accidents at work goes well beyond just those who work at the office, so a reminder that the people you work with every day have a life and family outside of work can go a long way.

Make Training Relevant

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but no one enjoys hundred-page PowerPoint presentations. Yes, it probably contains crucial information, but is it all relevant?

Whilst it can be hard to get face-time with employees, piling them into a room for three hours to stare at a presentation, of which 10-15% might only be relevant to them, is often less effective than doing nothing.

Instead – as above – get to know your employees as people and ensure you only deliver relevant safety information to them on a more regular basis. As a result, you’ll find they’ll be more engaged and less likely to nap.

Avoid Punishment AND Rewards

Whilst punishing and chastising employees for safety breaches is somewhat old hat these days (it’s more likely to lead to push back than any real change in behaviour), rewards for things like ‘X days without incident’ or ‘Y near-misses reported’ remain popular.

I advise against rewards for the simple fact that they can have unintended consequences, such as over-reporting.

Instead, recognition can be a far more valuable tool. Recognising the highlighted risk and the employee can be more effective in the long run and contribute to a more natural, habitual safety culture.

Making Safety a Habit

Fundamentally, making your safety culture subconscious means working directly with your employees and colleagues and portraying health and safety as a benefit rather than a hindrance. Don’t talk at them. Instead, talk with them, and lead by example.

I’ve worked with many businesses over the years to implement and maintain a healthy safety culture. If I can help you, send me a message on 07814 203 977, or use the contact form below.

Will AI put health and safety professionals out of a job?

There’s a common stereotype when it comes to health and safety managers: the person in the hi-vis, carrying the clipboard, maybe a bit old-fashioned. You might see this person making their rounds, scrawling notes, ready to compile a big, dense file later on.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still the case in plenty of businesses across the UK and beyond, and for the most part, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, the experience should be highly valued, and a trained eye with a risk assessment can be truly powerful, assuming the risk assessment isn’t just filed away into a drawer after.

Every so often, I take a look around and think, ‘Wow, we’re really living in the future. Everything from phones to fridges is starting to look like props from Blade Runner.

And health and safety, too, is entering the future – whether you want it to or not.

The future of health and safety

Being able to stop accidents before they happen is the fundamental goal of risk management. The majority of your time as a health and safety manager is spent identifying the dangers and what can be done to prevent them. Unfortunately, the unpredictability of human nature (the ‘Human Factor’) means even the best-laid plans can go awry.

As I’ve discussed before, overcoming the Human Factor involves putting in the effort to know those working on your site like people, rather than just statistics. By tuning yourself in and identifying potential triggers for risky behaviour, you’ve got a better chance of tackling it.

But you’ve got a million and one thing to do. As much as you’d like to, daily briefings and chats with the team aren’t feasible (and, let’s be honest, they’ll get sick of it pretty quickly, no matter how fun you try to make them.) You’re also limited in the amount of data you can glean from even the most comprehensive risk assessments.

So then, having a magic calculation that can predict the future would be amazing, right? And that’s exactly what AI predictive learning aims to do: input some data and out pops all your answers. According to what you told the machine, there’s a 98% chance of a vehicle collision in the warehouse. A 74% chance inter-office politics could lead to a damaging increase in stress.

You sit back, relax, and watch your near misses and absences plummet while all this is happening. Sounds good.

But could it actually be bad news for you?

Predicting health and safety

Predictive analytics aren’t a new phenomenon in health and safety. For decades, health and safety specialists have tried different algorithms to predict risk management with varying degrees of success.

Even risk assessments are a type of predictive science: you’re inputting potential risk factors and identifying their level and severity. By doing so, you’re predicting the dangers before they appear and hopefully putting controls in place to prevent them. It might not feel like Minority Report, but it’s the same idea.

There are a few standard predictive models in the field of predictive analytics, which all offer variations on ways to forecast safety:

Classification

This is considered to be one of the most simple and widely used types of forecasting. Essentially, the algorithm you use classifies historical data that you’ve collected into various categories, allowing you to ascertain, for example, the likelihood of equipment failure if it’s not recertified or whether a particular department is more likely to suffer a work-related injury.

Forecast

This model takes historical data and assigns it a metric value, identifying the occurrence and regularity of past safety failures to predict the likelihood of future failures.

Outliers

Contrary to the two previous types, outliers modelling focuses not on existing patterns but anomalous data. By identifying anomalies and outliers, areas that need health and safety attention can be identified.

Limitations

Whilst all the above types of predictive modelling have their benefits; they also have their drawbacks. This can be overcome by using different aspects of each model and combining them – but the biggest drawback remains our little brains.

These models can only analyse small to medium data samples because, fundamentally, the human brain isn’t all that powerful. As a result, we struggle to see patterns and often fall into the trap of our own biases.

To allow larger sets of data to be analysed to provide real, in-depth predictions, you need a machine. You need artificial intelligence.

Machine learning in health and safety

Machine learning essentially describes the use of these algorithms without any human intervention. As a result, computers can analyse massive amounts of data far beyond human ability quickly and easily. This could be a serious boon for companies, which could massively improve health and safety predictions and minimise the impact of safety breaches with a little investment in artificial intelligence.

With the right data, an artificial safety assistant could identify the potential for machine failure before a single bolt comes loose based on past failures. Likewise, it could identify a clash between two personality types before office politics triggers a spiral of stress that impacts efficiency.

Most importantly, it could identify the smallest gaps in your safety control measures before it triggers a chain reaction leading to injury or worse.

It sounds like a dream for managers terrified of on-site injuries and their costs in human and financial terms. But as a health and safety manager, you might be wondering: where do I come into this, and is a robot about to take my job?

Not quite Blade Runner

Although artificial intelligence is undeniably powerful in predictive modelling, the good news is that we’re a long way from a dystopian future where health and safety professionals are a thing of the past.

Although humans remain one of the biggest drawbacks of truly effective predictive modelling, they also remain crucial. The effectiveness of these AI predictions relies on the quality of the data collected and inputted. Therefore, these models are most effective when health and safety managers work in tandem with them.

As a risk manager, you need to know your site and business. The machine – for now – relies on you to collect the right data from the right places. For all the talk of science fiction, even the most complex AIs are useless without a human on the other end telling it what to do and giving it the right information to work with.

AIs also need training, much like a human assistant. All businesses and industries are different, and what goes in one might not work for the other. A safety professional with a piece of real, personalised business knowledge is needed to ensure the machine models are accurate.

So, don’t worry about losing your job to the machines. Instead, take advantage of these impressive advances and think about how implementing machine learning into your risk management processes could benefit you. By gaining a deeper understanding of the science behind predictive modelling and streamlining your information-gathering, you can massively improve the safety of everyone under your care.

The potential for AI within health and safety is massive, but health and safety professionals remain a crucial part. So tell Harrison Ford he can stand down.

I’ve been working closely with businesses and health and safety managers for two decades to identify ways to improve their health and safety processes. Can I help you? Get in touch via the contact form below or message me on 07814 203 977.