Create a culture of safety

Dave Chambers, Liniar’s project and facilities director, discusses the importance of embedding a safety culture. Having recently won a global award from parent company Quanex for its excellent safety record, Liniar continues to promote a strong safety culture across its sites.

Before 1974, there was only the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act originally implemented in 1802, often known as the Factory Act and originally aimed at protecting children and young apprentices in cotton mills.

The act was updated several times; however, by 1973 it was completely out of date. Deaths in the workplace were in their thousands – and accidents too many to count.

The introduction of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act (HASAWA) and Management Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (section 3) requires every workplace to have adequate assessment and apply effective control measures to minimise risk; and the implementation of the Act has significantly reduced deaths and accidents at work.

However, over recent years, accident rates have hit a plateau resulting in health and safety experts looking at how they can do things differently.

At Liniar, we know that we are on a continuous health and safety journey. We pride ourselves on our safety culture, but we are never complacent. We know that we can always do better

As a business, every management team meeting starts with safety. As our number one operational priority, it is never allowed to slip down the agenda. That way we ensure that we live and breathe a safety culture and any resulting actions can be communicated to all the other team members in Liniar. It is everyone’s responsibility.

The creation of an open and honest Safety Working Group allows Liniar team members to have constructive input into health and safety procedures and safe systems of working. There is little point in putting a person in charge of health and safety if they do not have a practical knowledge of the systems, working practices and environment – this can turn health and safety into tick box bureaucracy and be counter intuitive.

A safe system of working should be easy to understand and implemented to ensure that a safety culture can be adopted across each department.

Continuous improvement

There are some basic rules to follow to ensure that you have a positive safety culture:

  • Ensure safety is led from the top.
  • Ensure your risk assessments are thorough, suitable, and sufficient.
  • Invest in H&S training to develop and retain staff.
  • Collect data – better data helps to make better judgements.
  • Involve and empower the team members your control measures are likely to affect – disillusionment always leads to disengagement.
  • Learn from your mistakes and act positively.
  • Recognise and acknowledge team members’ input and successes.
  • Keep an open mind.
  • Inspire others in the organisation.
  • Learn new ways of doing things.
  • Accept that we might not know everything.
  • Share and involve everyone in our vision and plans.
  • Challenge the way we have always done things.

By using these rules and using an evaluation matrix, health and safety risks can be considerably reduced and, in some cases, mitigated completely.

Embed safety from the outset

To ensure the understanding of every team member, safety should be prioritised from the very first day they start and continue throughout their career with the company.

An induction plan that has health and safety included as the first point is vital for the new team member to recognise from the very outset that the company is committed to a culture of safety.

Health and safety training should be a continuous improvement programme. At Liniar, we have embarked on a mixture of IOSH training as well as bespoke courses. We have trained all the senior management team to ‘Lead Safely’, we have implemented a Liniar-specific training programme for our engineers who are now fully trained to complete their own risk assessments, and we’ve already had over 60 managers successfully pass the ‘Manage Safely’ course.

Our next phase of training will be the Liniar ‘Working Safely’ course for all 325 front line employees. We believe that investing in our team will ensure that the culture of safety is rooted in the fabric of the company. At the end of the day, everyone should be safe at work – that must be our priority.”