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.

Recently, I ran a poll on my LinkedIn page, asking how easy managers felt it was to get workers to report near-misses. Out of 296 votes, 42% said they found it not so easy, with 34% saying they found it challenging. Just 24% of people reported that it was easy to get people to report close encounters at work.

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.

Have you considered safety coaching when employees don’t follow the rules? It’s quicker than issuing disciplinary action, which is a managers first thought. Regular safety coaching can also help maintain employees safe working behaviour when you observe it being done.

It’s been a stressful year for most of us. Between the constantly changing coronavirus situation and a majority shift to working from home, many of us have likely found our stress levels rising.

Alternatively, the shift to homeworking may have helped relieve the stresses of office working, and now the idea of returning to the office may have employees anxious and worried.

To most right-minded individuals, ‘incompetent’ is quite the insult. Incompetence implies uselessness at a given task, possibly even dangerousness, and most of us – quite rightly – would take serious offence.

Safety and risk management at work is easy.

When you spot someone flouting the rules, all you need to do is pull them aside, show them your laminated safety posters on the office corkboard, give them a telling off, then send them on their way with a newfound passion for safety.

Except that’s not really how it works at all.

We’ve likely all had thoughts about ways to improve processes at work – in safety and beyond – no matter what role we’re in.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels comfortable enough to voice their opinions at work, either due to fear of judgment or the risks of punishment in poorly managed workplaces, where employees’ opinions are not high on the priority list.

The best way to make workers ignore safety briefings is to make them irrelevant.

Almost one year on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s safe to say the world has changed. One area seriously impacted by the pandemic is risk management and health and safety in the workplace.

In recent decades, health and safety has become a top priority for business globally, in construction and beyond.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is a vital part of many tasks in construction and beyond. The human body is not naturally equipped for many of the tasks we undertake at work. Using PPE means we can carry out these tasks without exposing ourselves to unnecessary risk.