How To Prevent The Most Common Workplace Hazards

The working environment is constantly evolving, making it challenging to keep on top of health and safety. But with reports showing that almost 4 million working days are lost because of injuries every year in the UK, the presence of these common workplace hazards are clear.

Although every workplace has its own unique set of hazards, here are the most common workplace hazards that are likely lurking in your environment.


Slips, Trips and Falls

Accounting for almost a third (32%) of all injuries in 2023, slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of workplace injury in the UK, despite being one of the simpler hazards to spot and prevent.

One of the key preventative measures is ensuring good visibility. You should make sure that everyone can clearly see their path ahead, allowing them to double-check for any hazards eg. wet surfaces, objects in the way, uneven ground or steps. Areas should also be well-lit with walkways kept clear and dry, therefore ensuring that the path ahead can be seen.

It is also important to highlight any ‘problem areas’ to alert others to be more attentive. Some common methods to highlight these areas are:

  • Signs – ‘Wet floor’ signs or ‘Caution when wet’ signs are some of the most widely used options.
  • Highlighting steps – often bright grip tape is placed on ledges to highlight the elevation change to prevent trips.
  • Slip-resistant flooring – Commonly placed near entrances to stop wet walkways from becoming a hazard.
Safety tape on a staircase.

Fire Hazards

Fires remain a persistent and common hazard to businesses across the country, with a reported 22,000 workplace fires every year. To combat this, regular employee training is a necessity, and this can be done as a group session or online via a fire safety training course. Afterwards, taking this training periodically will refresh your employees’ knowledge.

It is also necessary to ensure that countermeasures are accounted for in case of a fire breaking out. This means checking your fire alarms and fire extinguishers regularly for damage, ensuring they are unobstructed and functional. Additionally, an evacuation plan should be in place, ensuring that everybody has a safe route out of the building – with any assistance necessary if needed.

Man inspecting a fire extinguisher, to monitor the common workplace hazard

Electrical Hazards

Often forgotten, electrical hazards can pose a huge risk to your workplace safety if not regularly maintained. Shorting out circuits could potentially cause safety systems to fail, thereby increasing the risk of fires.

Simple yet regular checks are often the best way to keep on top of electrical risks, with formal maintenance and inspections carried out by a professional when necessary. Some key areas to check regularly are:

  • Cables – are they all intact and insulated correctly, with no signs of damage?
  • Outlets – are they in good condition and properly grounded?
  • Overloading – are the outlets overloaded?
Overloaded electrical outlet creating an electrical hazard

Ergonomic Hazards

Ergonomics often get disregarded when it comes to health and safety, but with almost half a million workers suffering from work-related musculoskeletal disorders every year in the UK, their importance is clear. Despite this high prevalence, it is one of the easier risks to eliminate.

Increasing awareness is the most common method to mitigate the hazards in the workplace, as employees can take more responsibility of their own workspace and adjust it accordingly. The best way to raise awareness among your staff is through training. A short eLearning course can effectively cover everything they need to know, and also gives you a record of when that was last completed.

Following on from the training, staff will then need to alter their workspaces to suit. This will involve adjusting everything from screen height for office workers to introducing equipment for heavy lifting for the more active sectors. Accommodating these changes will eliminate the ergonomic hazards, helping you prevent any injuries occurring because of poor ergonomics.

Poor ergonomics due to poor workplace hazard management

By identifying and eliminating these common workplace hazards, it can massively benefit both your business and your employees. This will help you to create a much safer and more efficient working environment, which will boost not only your business’s productivity but also its reputation. These implementations can all take place whilst also improving your staff’s morale and well-being by taking the ‘edge’ off your working environment; making it feel safer, whilst reducing staff injury and ill-health.


Sources:

HSE (2023) ‘Health and Safety at work statistics’. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overview.htm (Accessed: 27/06/2024)

Dorset Fire Protection (2023) ‘Common Causes of Workplace Fires’. Available at: https://dorsetfireprotection.co.uk/common-causes-workplace-fires/ (Accessed: 27/06/2024)

What is a Workplace Inspection?

A Workplace Inspection is the process of acutely examining the workplace to identify hazards and ensure that all health and safety standards are met. This then allows you to ensure that your workplace is safe and compliant and allows you to mitigate/eliminate the remaining risks.

Under the Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of both the risks to the health and safety of their employees that they encounter while at work, and the risks to the people not under employment.


What are the different types of inspections?

Workplace inspections can be either formal or informal, with the informal inspections being quick checks. There are four types of formal inspections, and they are:

  • Safety surveys – a general inspection of high-risk areas, activities, or processes
  • Safety Tours – a general inspection of the whole workplace
  • Safety Sampling – a systematic sampling approach of the high-risk areas, activities, or processes
  • Incident/accident inspections – After an incident has occurred (near miss, injury, or fatality) a full inspection of the cause and prevention. (this may need to be reported to the relevant health and safety authority)
Workplace Safety handbook with PPE surrounding

Who should complete the workplace inspection?

A formal inspection of the workplace should be carried out by multiple people ranging from health and safety specialists/committee members to supervisors/managers. This will often require you to bring in an external health and safety expert to ensure nothing is missed.

The HSE states that for formal inspections “Union-appointed health and safety representatives can inspect the workplace. They have to give reasonable notice in writing when they intend to carry out a formal inspection of the workplace, and have not inspected it in the previous three months”.


When do you need to complete a workplace inspection?

How often a workplace inspection is required depends on many variables, from the nature/risk of your workplace to significant changes occurring. But with no set timeframe it is up to discretion, here are some things to consider when deciding on the frequency of your regular inspections.

Workplace risk – the level of risk plays a huge role in how often an inspection is required with high-risk environments, such as a construction site, requiring frequent inspections when compared to an office for example.

Significant Changes – How often your workplace changes is also important when determining how often you need to carry out inspections, as significant change will deem your old inspection outdated and will need to be reviewed as soon as possible. Significant change can be anything from a large change in staff (both numbers and experience) to a change of building layout or premises completely or even a change in equipment/machinery.

Specialists’ opinion – Formal inspections require a health and safety specialist present, so you can contact your trusted specialist to recommend your next review/inspection window.

Worker on tablet/iPad completing workplace inspection.

How to complete a workplace inspection

Completing a workplace inspection depending on the environment can contain many different steps. For simpler workspaces, the responsible person will likely be able to use a risk assessment template to complete a sufficient assessment providing they have adequate health and safety experience.

However, for higher-risk or more complex workplaces, it is advised to bring in a health and safety specialist to ensure that your workplace inspections are completed to a high standard. This can then be further improved by assessing the workplace in a group to not miss out on any risks.


References

HSE (2023) ‘Inspections of the Workplace’. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/involvement/inspections.htm (Accessed: 17/01/2024)

Legislation.Gov (2014) ‘Health and Safety at Work Act 1974’. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/section/2 (Accessed: 17/01/2024)

When to update your Fire Risk Assessments

Fire Risk Assessments are a crucial part of fire safety and a legal requirement for all businesses. So, it is important to know how and when they need to be updated, and this responsibility falls upon the ‘responsible person’. But before we dive into that we should clarify:

What is a Fire Risk Assessment?

A Fire Risk Assessment is a review of the premises which identifies any potential fire risks/hazards and who that may affect. The assessment also checks that the correct measures are in place to minimise the risks and allow for a safe escape in the event of a fire.

Who is the ‘Responsible Person’?

The responsible person is either the person who owns the building or manages the premises, this is most likely the employer. Their duty is to make sure the Fire Risk Assessment has been completed by a competent person and to keep the staff safe from risk, this often involves ensuring that adequate training and information are provided to staff.

Worker using a tablet to complete a Fire Risk Assessment

When should you update your Fire Risk Assessments?

Many factors affect how often an update to your Fire Risk Assessment is required, so it’s not as simple as every … years. But here is what the law states from section 9 of The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005:

“such assessment must be reviewed by the responsible person regularly so as to keep it up to date and particularly if —

(a)there is reason to suspect that it is no longer valid; or

(b)there has been a significant change in the matters to which it relates including when the premises, special, technical and organisational measures, or organisation of the work undergo significant changes, extensions, or conversions”

Understanding the Regulatory Reform Order 2005

Although there is no set-and-forget timeframe, the law does say that the assessment must be reviewed regularly by a responsible person. This can be anyone who qualifies as competent, most likely the responsible person, a health and safety officer or a professional assessor.

Reviews are shorter than full-blown assessments, so although it may seem as though only minor things have changed, we recommend a review regularly to keep it up to date even if it seems as though nothing has changed, as small changes can have large impacts on the safety of the building.

Along with regular reviews, it is important to complete new fire risk assessments when major changes occur, as seen in the RRO 2005 (Regulatory Reform Order 2005), these include but are not limited to:

  • Significant change in premises (size, structure, layout)
  • Significant change in the number of staff
  • Significant change in procedures/processes
  • Or any other reason that could invalidate the current assessment.
Man inspecting a fire extinguisher as part of his fire safety checks

The importance of Fire Risk Assessments

Although health and safety can sometimes feel like a drag, it is crucial to complete and upkeep to a high standard, especially when it comes to fire safety as it injures thousands of people yearly in the UK alone.

Fire Risk Assessments are necessary to keep everyone safe whilst on site, making it both a legal and moral requirement for them to be completed to a high standard. Otherwise, you could face unlimited fines or even 2 years in prison for major offences.

Not only does fire pose a risk to life but also to your business, so regular reviews of your Fire Risk Assessment will give you peace of mind that your business is safe.

Help with Fire Risk Assessments

If you would like to book a professional Fire Risk Assessment today you can click here.

Or if you would like to complete your regular reviews yourself, a Fire Risk Assessment template will help you, see here.


References

Gov (2023) ‘Fire Safety In The Workplace’. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/workplace-fire-safety-your-responsibilities/enforcement-appeals-and-penalties (accessed: 27/10/2023)

Gov legislation (2005) ‘The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005’. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/1541/article/9/made (accessed: 27/10/2023)

7 Fire Safety checks to do regularly

England’s Fire and Rescue Services attend around 65,000 fires every year, with 14,000 of them taking place in business premises. Evidently, fire safety is crucial to any organisation, and we can never be too safe when dealing with something so devastatingly dangerous.

Who is responsible for your fire safety?

By law, you need to reach a minimum standard for preventative fire safety measures in all buildings except single-owned dwellings, as per the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. This order holds a legal obligation for the ‘responsible person’ to manage the fire safety of the premises.

The ‘responsible person’ is most likely the employer, but can also be the building owner or the person that has control over the premises. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to:

  • ensuring that a fire risk assessment has been completed by a competent person,
  • ensuring the safety of their employees from harm,
  • providing employees with relevant information on the risks identified and measures to prevent it,
  • providing employees with adequate fire safety training.

The responsible person is held accountable for an organisation’s fire safety standards, and can face unlimited fines or a prison sentence for up to 2 years if they do not withhold these standards.

In this blog, we have compiled a short list of important checks you should carry out alongside your other preventative safety measures.


1. Check your fire alarms

Fire alarms play a vital role in saving lives, so it is key that they are checked regularly.

Article 17(1) of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO) requires the responsible person to ensure that any fire alarm system are “subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair.”

To comply with this legislation, you should check your fire alarms weekly.

All manual call points should also be checked at the same time for damage, and you must make sure they are easily accessible with nothing obstructing them.


2. Check your bins

Bins are a common target for arson, which according to The National Fire Chief’s Council (NFCC), are the leading cause of fires that require a response from the Fire & Rescue services. Therefore, maintaining and checking them regularly is key to minimising risk.

You need to check that external bins are not located close to buildings and are emptied regularly. You also need to check that fuels or anything that has been previously alight is correctly disposed of (e.g. cigarettes and matches).

Some other preventative measures you can take include:

  • Keeping large bins and waste locked away, so they are not accessible to anyone unauthorised
  • Ensure bins are not wall-mounted beneath a window, by a door, or an overhanging roof
  • Ensure they are kept away from the perimeters of the property

3. Check your fire doors and fire exits

Fire doors are key to preventing the spread of fire, as they can hold back smoke and flames between 30-60 minutes, depending on their quality. The first thing you should check:

Is the door structurally intact?

This means that there is no damage to the door and it is still fitted correctly, with the closing mechanism still automatically closing the door shut.

It is also important to check that your fire doors are not being propped open by an object.

Next, the condition of cold smoke seals and intumescent strips needs to be checked for damage.

Without these, the door loses functionality and will no longer meet the required standards. It is also important to check that the door’s opening mechanism works well every time.

And finally, for fire exits you should check that the path is clear and there is nothing obstructing them.


4. Check your signage

The law requires the responsible person to ensure that all emergency routes and exits are indicated by signage.

You need to check that signs are clean and visible, so that in case of an emergency the way out is clear and well-lit.

Also check that signs are not damaged or have a loose fixing, as this may become problematic if not fixed.


5. Check your electrical equipment

Faulty and misused electrical equipment is a common cause of fires, so it is important that they are checked regularly as part of your fire safety checks.

They often have many hazards to check for, from where they are placed to the sockets they are plugged into. You need to check that:

  • Plug sockets are not overloaded or hot
  • Wires and cables are not damaged

It is also important to make sure that anything that may get hot or has moving parts (like fans) are kept clear of any obstructions and are at no risk of falling over.

It is also good to make sure all electrics are PAT tested, as that is one of the ways you can fill the legal duty to maintain your electrical equipment to a safe standard, as per the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989.


6. Check your fire extinguishers

BS 5306-3:2017 is the British standard for fire extinguishing installations and equipment on premises, and Paragraph 11.2 recommends that all fire extinguishers are subject to a visual inspection by a competent person on a monthly basis. The result of the test should be recorded, and any deficiencies acted upon.

To meet this standard, the check must ensure:

  • Each extinguisher is correctly located in the designated space, is unobstructed, and accessible
  • The operating instructions are clean, legible, and face forwards
  • The reading of the pressure gauge is within the ‘green’ zone and any indicator is within safety limits
  • Each extinguisher has not been used, damaged, or tampered with

Fire extinguishers must be readily available for use throughout the building but especially on an emergency exit route. They need to be checked regularly for obstructions that may block access to them and for damage.

Also, are there enough of the right extinguisher type for the risks present?

For example, you should have enough CO2 extinguishers for use on any electrical fires that are accessible throughout the whole building – minimum requirements should be detailed within your fire risk assessment. For advice on this you, you can also try our free fire extinguisher calculator.


7. Check your emergency plan

It is also key to make sure that there is a suitable emergency plan for when a fire is detected. The law places a duty on the responsible person to manage arrangements for actions to be taken in the event of a fire on the premises.

The emergency plan should include:

  • A detailed description of everybody’s roles
  • The alarm systems in place to alert everybody
  • All assembly points
  • Arrangements for the evacuation of the vulnerable (young children, disabled, elderly etc.)
  • Contingency plans

Overall, these checks will help give you that little bit more confidence and peace of mind. If completed regularly, they will also boost the fire safety standards in your premises and make sure that any simple-to-fix flaws are checked for regularly.

These checks will also aid in helping you comply with your responsibilities as a ‘responsible person’, but they should ideally be used to complement established professional fire safety measures you follow, not replace them.  


Bibliography

The National Archives (2005) ‘The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005’. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/1541/contents/made (Accessed: 28/04/2023)

Gov.uk (2023) ‘Fire safety in the workplace’. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/workplace-fire-safety-your-responsibilities (Accessed: 28/04/2023)

BSI (2017) ‘Fire extinguishing installations and equipment on premises – Commissioning and maintenance of portable fire extinguishers. Code of practice’. Available at: https://knowledge.bsigroup.com/products/fire-extinguishing-installations-and-equipment-on-premises-commissioning-and-maintenance-of-portable-fire-extinguishers-code-of-practice-1/tracked-changes (Accessed: 28/04/2023)

NFCC (2019) ‘Arson’. Available at: https://www.nationalfirechiefs.org.uk/Arson (Accessed: 28/04/2023)

Gov.uk (2023) ‘Fire statistics data tables’. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fire-statistics-data-tables (Accessed: 02/04/2023)

Last Week in Health and Safety

Color, Egg, Broken

A quick round-up of the biggest health and safety stories from the week commencing 18th November 2019:

A ‘No-light’ Christmas in Penbury

Last week Kent County Council refused to issue a Christmas lights permit for Penbury because the planned lights and decorations are twice as heavy as the lamp posts can safely hold. This last minute decision by the council has left no room for alternative arrangements. Full story here.


Egg production company ordered to shell out over £60,000 in fines

A Lancashire egg production company was fined £60,000 by the HSE after a forklift overturned and seriously injured its driver.

“Companies should be aware that HSE will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action against those that fall below the required standards” said the HSE inspector, as Staveley’s Eggs Ltd were also ordered to pay costs of £4,259.42. Full story here.


Combustible cladding concerns could involve ‘more than 100,000 buildings’

According to Inside Housing, minutes from a September meeting between representatives of London boroughs and government officials revealed that reducing the official high-rise building threshold from 18-metres to 11-metres would raise the amount of buildings under scrutiny from just 12,000 to over 100,000. Full story here.

Health & Safety Compliance in the Digital Environment

‘Convergence Culture’

“Ready or not, we are already living in a convergence culture” declared Jenkins (Convergence Culture, 2006) during another period of booming technological advancement – notably the dawn of the smartphone age. In broader culture the term ‘convergence’ had already been borrowed from Biology, adopted in Economics, Mathematics and Computing; generally alluding to a theory that basically describes a phenomenon where some creatures living in the same environment – although unrelated to each other, will eventually morph into a similar structure independently or develop identical traits.

In Telecommunications Policy (1998) several authors describe technological convergence along the aforementioned biological lines: multiple functions/technologies predicted to eventually share the same platform either for necessity or to increase efficiency. Fast-forward more than 20 years and the digital landscape has not failed to live up to lofty predictions, with the modern internet certainly boosting the speed in which progress has occurred.

Currently it has become expected that almost every electronic device serves multiple functions. For example the wristwatch can now receive and make phone calls alongside serving as a digital running and exercise companion – surprisingly the (then lauded) Fitbit was only launched in 2010. However for Q3 of 2018, Apple’s Smartwatch leapfrogged Fitbit for second place in global shipments and market share, achieving a year-over-year growth of 54% compared to Fitbit’s 3.1% shrinkage; an impressive feat for a company merely incorporating a related activity into their ‘smartwatch’ platform – convergence reaping benefits.

Convergence Meets Compliance

Health & safety compliance has also experienced convergence, albeit at a slower pace than larger culture. Any potential advancements in the industry are of course expected to be subject to – and limited by health & safety legislation and regulations; and this is important because legislation (primarily the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974) created the government agency Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and gave them (to be more specific, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) broad powers in forming prosecutable health & safety regulations.

However the enhanced accessibility of up-to-date and indexed legislation online through the HSE’s information portals has meant that external consultation of health & safety law is in essence no longer needed. Realistically a medium to small company can compose its health & safety policy internally with minimal prior expertise. Along similar lines, the subject of data protection law which was passed as the GDPR in 2018 and the Data Protection Act of 1998 before that (addressed by Whenmouth previously here) has in practice converged with health & safety under the broad umbrella of compliance.

Compliance – or in this context: ‘regulatory compliance’, is simply about an organisation adhering to internal and/or external regulations for which incurred penalties range from a small fine to full-blown prosecution. So for example, a fire risk assessment and GDPR training for the organisation’s Data Protection Officer/s (both which are mandatory under current law) and tangible proof that these activities have been completed (eg. certificates) means that a singular system that logs, stores, and makes this proof immediately accessible trumps alternatively having multiple separate systems for this, especially for convenience and time-efficiency.

Increasing efficiency normally results in the reduction of business operating costs; and the emergence of software that has the capacity to incorporate various related activities under the compliance umbrella has been inevitable. Another example: Human Resources programs and Learning Management Systems (LMS) operate at different points along the compliance scale, but the desire to integrate related functions into a singular platform has seen the emergence and growth of software like Smartlog, which both manages compliance-relevant employee data and allocates mandatory e-learning courses to selected members of staff.

The Importance of a Core Competency

In order to successfully sell units, a highly capable product still needs credibility, especially one that has converged. Much like Apple’s branding retaining its credibility in the fitness and health watch market (as mentioned previously) or Samsung’s vast electronics experience massively contributing in their overtaking of Nokia as the market leader for mobile phone unit sales in 2012: a core competency is needed in order to retain any market credibility and successful integrate.

Amidst the integration of health & safety e-learning, risk assessment templates, site management alerts, logs, task allocation & monitoring, and (soon to be) asset management into Smartlog; Safesmart’s core competency lies in a history of fire safety engineering and consultations as well as an active fire risk assessment service that is up and down the country every week. It is a brand that puts fire safety at the top of the compliance pile, with the experience and expertise to back this up.

This is mainly because fire safety remains the heart of workplace health & safety, with 11,141 accidental non-residential fires attended by the Fire and Rescue services in England during 2017/18. These incidents resulted in 12 fatalities and 653 casualties with notably 2,245 (20%) of the fires occurred in offices/call centres, retail and hospitals/medical care; reinforcing both the ethical and legal need for all types of businesses to conduct a thorough fire risk assessment regularly.

Overall fire accident deaths only accounted for 8.3% of the 144 total workplace fatalities in 2017/18, however alongside the devastating personal injuries and losses of life, fire incidents by nature also more often result in copious amounts of property and asset damage of which very few businesses would be able to recover from financially.

Summary

According to HSE (2018) there has been a long-term downward trend in the rate of fatal injury per 100,000 workers since 1989, with the 2017/18 rate around a fifth (1/5) of the 1988/89 figures. So evidently workplace safety has improved over the years; and alongside the technological leaps and bounds in communications during the last couple of decades, improvements are also occurring in the delivery of health & safety compliance management and training, especially in regards to efficiency.

Convergence continues to drive innovations in the digital sphere and larger society, but with seemingly endless possibilities in the amount of different business management functions that can be potentially converged into a single platform, any limit will simply depend on the business and their compliance needs. But objectively some functions are more important than others, especially in relation to the law; which essentially means that across the board there is a one size fits all option.

Bibliography

Bohlin, E. (ed.)(1998) ‘Convergence and new regulatory frameworks: A comparative study of regulatory approaches to Internet telephony’ in ‘Telecommunications Policy Vol.22, Issue 10′. Elsevier

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture. New York University Press

Forbes (2010) ‘Getting Fitbit’. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/11/fitbit-tracker-pedometer-lifestyle-heatlh-lifetracking.html#124362215556 (accessed: 23/05/2019)

IDC (2018) ‘New Product Launches Drive Double-Digit Growth in the Wearables Market, Says IDC’. Available at: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44500418 (accessed: 23/05/2019)

Deloitte (-) ‘Regulatory & ethical compliance: Navigating through choppy waters‘ . Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/audit/articles/regulatory-and-ethical-compliance.html (accessed: 30/05/2019)

GOV.UK (-) ’Fire safety in the workplace’. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/workplace-fire-safety-your-responsibilities/fire-risk-assessments (accessed: 30/05/2019)

GOV.UK (2019) ‘Fire statistics data tables’(Fire 0301 sheet). Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fire-statistics-data-tables#non-dwelling-fires-attended (accessed: 28/05/2019)

HSE (2018) ‘Workplace fatal injuries in Great Britain 2018’. Available at: http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf (accessed: 23/05/2019)

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