Prioritising health and safety at work every day.
Nicky Chenery, EMEA General Manager, SafetyCulture discusses how to serve up 5-star safety.
Last week the United Nations World Health and Safety Day at Work took place. As we emerge from the pandemic, it’s clear that the issues championed by the campaign need to remain high on the agenda. According to the UK Labour Force Survey, in 2020/21 more than 400,000 people sustained a non-fatal injury in the workplace.
Those in hospitality are no strangers to the importance of creating a robust culture of health and safety in the workplace. Hospitality workers can often find themselves in high pressure situations — fast turnarounds, high heat, heavy lifting. Safety isn’t simply a box to tick, it’s paramount to running a business.
The success of any safety strategy is underpinned by its people. Frontline workers are the ones closest to operations on the ground, providing a unique window into places of work. This means they are pivotal to driving cultural change in an organisation.
So, what can hospitality businesses do to ensure safe working practices stay on the menu?
Start with the right ingredients
To ensure health and safety is prioritised throughout the business, business owners should invest time in creating a robust strategy. With a formal health and safety strategy that outlines goals and objectives, businesses are able to better understand and consider what technology and practices are needed to launch and maintain new operational standards.
Similarly, a considered strategy will ensure that businesses allocate the right amount of investment and resources into this critical area. According to the UK Government Management of Health and Safety in the Workplace statistics, only a third of businesses in the UK have a specific health and safety budget. Having an allocated budget, focused on health and safety, is key to making plans a reality.
Key data from our most recent research revealed that 1 in 4 UK frontline workers don’t know where their company’s health and safety policy is, while 1 in 10 don’t even know if one exists. Clear communication and detailed onboarding plans are simple steps to take to make swift improvements in this area.
Leaning on smart safety
Empowering hospitality workers with easy-to-use technology can go a long way toward improving their effectiveness in carrying out health and safety protocols. By equipping them with the tools and autonomy to drive initiatives forward, we can help make regulations easier to follow and maintain. Introducing technology that can help staff perform checks, report issues, and collect on-the-ground data in minutes, can mean the difference between being at-risk or at the ready.
Technology can also play a key role in closing communication gaps at work – particularly across highly dispersed workforces that have become increasingly prevalent since the advent of social distancing and staff shortages due to COVID and Brexit. In particular, technology can ensure rapid communications on critical safety and policy updates, can be received via employees’ personal devices.
Similarly, technology can go a long way in ensuring the health and safety of hospitality workers in remote or isolating situations. Lone worker apps which can be added to employees’ smartphones to help provide fast GPS services, welfare checks, and panic alarms, are a prime example of how technology can make a difference. This allows for a much safer working environment, as well as helping businesses to manage employee safety more easily.
What this means for organisations?
World Health and Safety Day at Work is a time for us to reflect on what more we can do to prevent issues and incidents by creating or bolstering our safety culture in the workplace. Democratising safety technology allows businesses to lay a foundation that brings out the best in their team, their protocols and their outputs. It’s a guaranteed path to operational excellence. And most importantly, it’s how leaders can ensure staff feel confident, validated and heard: and go home safe, every day.
About SafetyCulture
SafetyCulture is the operational heartbeat of working teams around the world. Its mobile-first operations platform leverages the power of human observation to identify issues and opportunities for businesses to improve every day. More than 28,000 organisations use its flagship products, iAuditor and EdApp, to perform checks, train staff, report issues, automate tasks and communicate fluidly. SafetyCulture powers over 600 million checks per year, approximately 50,000 lessons per day and millions of corrective actions, giving leaders visibility and workers a voice in driving safety, quality and efficiency improvements.
Recent analysis by Forrester found that SafetyCulture’s flagship products provide a 214% return on investment for customers, and USD $3.6M in cost savings from operational improvements.
Customers of SafetyCulture’s award winning products include the likes of Shell, United Nations, Virgin Active, Cathay Pacific, Mars and BP Chargemaster.
Bio: Nicky Chenery, General Manager, EMEA, SafetyCulture
Nicky Chenery, EMEA General Manager, SafetyCultureNicky Chenery is General Manager for EMEA at SafetyCulture, a global technology company helping working teams get better every day. Its mobile-first operations platform leverages the power of human observation to give workers a voice, leaders visibility and unite teams to improve.
More than 28,000 organisations use its flagship products, iAuditor and EdApp, to perform checks, train staff, report issues, automate tasks and communicate fluidly. SafetyCulture powers over 600 million checks per year, approximately 50,000 lessons per day and millions of corrective actions, giving leaders visibility and workers a voice in driving safety, quality and efficiency improvements.