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When your employees are doing the stuff that you are employing them to do, and you are hoping beyond hope that they are doing those things safely, is hoping enough?
Well, the cold hard truth is, no, it’s not.
If you have a read of this article, I’ve given the reasons why risk assessments are the way to go to limit your liability in the work environment. But the thing is, once you have assessed the risk of these activities, you are faced with a little problem.
You must find a way to communicate the control measures you have selected, to your employees.
Enter the Method Statement!
Is there method in your madness?
What we are trying to achieve here is taking the information that you have come up with in a risk assessment and explaining it in terms that your employees can understand, straight forward, and simple.
You see, just because you have created a nice risk assessment, detailing all the actions you want your team to take or not take, doesn’t automatically mean they’ll understand them or even read them!
We like to think that by sitting people down and telling them that they have to read and sign a risk assessment, that magically it gets us off the hook and they will understand and follow it…
Spoiler alert… it doesn’t.
Complicated, means useless
Employers have a legal obligation to provide information, instruction and training to their employees in a form that ensures their employees’ health and safety. There is a ton of case law which shows though, that any instruction or training that is given to employees must be pitched at a level and in a format that will be taken in and understood.
It’s a difficult point to raise, but if we are honest, there is a fair proportion of the workforce that have poor reading and comprehension skills, and as such, the responsibility falls to the employer to make sure that any instructions that are issued are at a simple enough level to be understood by the least academic person on the team.
Simple, Clear and Brief
All of this sounds like just more work and more hassle for no good reason doesn’t it?
Here is the thing, your team members are only making you money when they are doing the thing that you employed them to do!
So, if we can find a way to convey safety information to them, as quickly and simply as possible, preferably in a format that they will be regularly reminded of, they can get on with doing the job… safely.
Injured employees are unproductive employees. Injury claims, accident investigations and potential Health and Safety Executive interventions are, at best expensive and at worst might be the end of your business or freedom. And importantly, we want to make sure that our businesses are not operating in a way that could cause harm to people!
I for one wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I thought that my apathy had caused injury to someone else.
Just get to the point
What exactly does a method statement mean? The beauty of this is that a method statement can be anything that you can produce that effectively communicates the way you want a task to be undertaken to your team. That means it doesn’t have to include detail of the whys and wherefores, just the DO’s and DON’TS.
Here is a top tip.
Signs can be useful to reiterate instructions if used correctly. But instructional or directional signs shouldn’t be relied on in isolation. Yes, they are extremely useful, but for the following two reasons, you need to use them as a supplementary resource rather than in their own right.
- To make sure your employees understand and that so you can prove you told them! Signs in strategic locations in the workplace are brilliant, except that if the worst happens and someone is hurt, there are too many variables effecting your confidence that the employee has seen and understood the instruction. Let’s say you have a ‘sound horn’ sign on a blind bend in a warehouse. A new employee rounding the corner with a pallet lifted on a forklift truck may have his vision obscured by the load when he rounds the corner. Are you sure he saw it? Can you prove he did to an investigating inspector?
- Sign blindness. If I asked you, exactly what the fuel gauge says on your car, like, does it say [0— ½—1] or [E——–F] or is it just a pictorial diagram of a wide line tapering to a point, would you know? I mean, you look at that thing every single day, don’t you?
So, can you be sure what it looks like? And that’s an example of something that you need to consciously look at every day, so what about lots and lots of signs that just become indistinct blurs in the background?
Sign (on the dotted line)
A page of basic instructional statements, separated into bullet points with pictograms where appropriate (especially where English is not always the first language) to supplement adequate signage is definitely the way to go in most cases.
This document sits separately from the risk assessment and is used as a training resource for your team and should be provided to them in their induction session. A signature from your employee confirms they have understood how you want the tasks performed, giving you your proof of adequate training and instruction.
This is your opportunity to set the limits of risk that you are prepared to accept, right from the off. Here you are saying you have looked at the task, assessed the risk and figured out a method that reduces risk to an acceptable level. The employee knows that as long as they follow the instructions on every time, the task is safe. Of course, if they choose not to follow it… then it is clear that they will bear at least some of the responsibility for their actions.
Taking the easy way out…
There is an incredible temptation here for you to slide some of the responsibility for assessing the risk on to the employee in certain circumstances.
I have lost count of the amount of times I have been told that, “the employee was supposed to carry out a dynamic risk assessment each time.” – when I have been investigating an accident in a business.
Here is the problem, in the eyes of the law, it doesn’t wash.
Also, it’s a bad idea for you as the employer to do this. Let me explain.
The person who is responsible in the eyes of the law for the employee’s wellbeing, is the employer, plain and simple (and morally correctly too). You’ll also find this reflected when you are dealing with civil injury claims, which makes it a bad idea for you to trust anyone else in deciding when and if controls are used.
Eager to please
For example, you have looked at the items handled in your warehouse and decided that some of them are too heavy to safely (or legally) lift without the aid of a second person.
You provide some ‘manual handling training’… you know, bend the knees etc… and instruct your employees that if they think a box is too heavy, they must have a second person to lift it with them (a dynamic risk assessment). Great, risk assessment done, method statement written, we can all go home, right?
Human nature is such that we look for the quickest and easiest way to do anything at all. If you have 50 boxes to move before lunch, and one of them looks to be right on the limit of what you consider you can lift safely on your own, you are faced with a choice.
The other store-person is nowhere to be seen and you need to load that truck before you can go to lunch. Oh, and by the way, the boss will be angry if the truck is late as well!
What do you do? You lift the box on your own of course.
Now here is the thing, what if boxes of that size are always packed to make them too heavy to lift and boxes below that size aren’t? Couldn’t we change the assessment and method statement to simply say, ‘boxes up to this size are a single person lift… and boxes of this size and over require two people’. Then, better still, have the boxes of the larger size printed with a warning symbol and ‘two-person lift’ instruction on them to supplement the method statement.
Deadly contradictions
So, we have nice, specific risk assessments in place. You have drawn up simple method statements and supplemented them with appropriate signage. When inducting an employee you provide training and instruction and review the method statements with them, communicating all of the risk control measures to them properly. How awesome is that?!
You can’t possibly go wrong! Well, there is just one more golden nugget that I want to share with you now.
Nothing you have done so far amounts to anything if you make the classic mistake that almost all business owners make at one time or another! Don’t contradict yourself!
Let’s take our example above, with the boxes. Everything is in place, and you have told your employees repeatedly about following the instructions. But…
Because of tight budgets, you have instructed your warehouse manager to find as many efficiencies as possible. In response, she approaches you with a revised roster, which cuts the amount of people on shift down, so that at certain points in the day, there is only one person working. You’re busy and stressed and I can honestly understand that, but here is the thing, you sign off on it.
That means that it is now impossible for your employees to follow the method statement you have introduced.
What will happen next? Your method statement will be ignored. Someone may or may not be injured. But crucially, the status of that method statement, and any others you have implemented will be fatally compromised, and you will now have lost control of the risk in your business. Any accidents that happen now, fall entirely on your shoulders again, no exceptions.
(In this instance, appropriate lifting equipment is probably the way to go.)
Take the opportunity
Producing the humble method statement is probably one of the most valuable exercises you can do to address work practices in your business.
It can be used as an opportunity to look for efficiencies too.
Regularly reviewing your risk assessments and method statements is essential to make sure you keep from falling foul of anything we have discussed so far. Simple toolbox talks are also a great little device to make sure everyone is regularly reminded about how you want things done.
I know all this probably seems daunting, but once you get going it really isn’t too hard. There are lots of resources available freely on the Health and Safety Executive’s website, and I will also be producing some really simple tools to help you out over the coming months too.
If you take this stuff seriously, you won’t regret it.
Get involved
As you can see from the post, I am trying to give simple practical help to leaders wherever I can. I would love to hear your thoughts on the tips in this article, so it would be great if you could leave some comments below. Have you introduced simple method statements? Let me know below!
I will be offering lots of pointers on this site as I develop the content and so let me know about anything you’d like me to cover too. I am also developing some great resources for leaders, and if you subscribe in the box at the top of this page, you’ll get FREE access to the new 32 page E-book, ‘New Leader Quick Start Guide’. If you want to establish yourself as a great leader and develop a creative motivated team, this E-book is for you!
See you for the next article!
Until next time
Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and
Leadership Coach
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