Making Health and Safety Positive – Duct Work Cleaning Professionals Ingot Services Share Their Secrets

At Ingot Services, as well as offering guidance on duct work cleaning issues, we are often asked for our advice on health and safety in the workplace. 

When it comes to workplace health and safety , the law is clear, and laid out mainly in the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The extent of your duties will depend very much on your business and the aspects within it, for instance, regular duct work cleaning is a requirement by law if you have a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system within your workplace. But as a minimum, every employer has a duty of care to ensure that the workplace is safe and that safe working practices are adhered to. 

Negative associations with health and safety policies can hinder not only compliance with regulations, but can also endanger lives. So how can managers make sure that their employees buy into health and safety policies?

A Positive Health and Safety Culture

The culture of an organisation reflects how it operates – how, where, who, when and why things are done. The health and safety culture within an organisation does the same, describing how health and safety is managed, where it applies, who is responsible, when it applies and why policies are in place. Within the HSE document 'HSG65 – Successful Health and Safety Management' health and safety culture is defined as “the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation's health and safety management”. As with the productivity and success of business, to successfully implement health and safety policy, the culture has to be a positive one, and the key to this is communication.

Assessing Your Health and Safety Culture

Reviewing the culture of health and safety within your organisation, there are key aspects that can highlight either a positive or a poor culture.  These include:

• Are health and safety policies well communicated and understood?
• Is it clear how people should behave?
• Are health and safety systems complied with?
• Is management all on board?
• Is safety put above cost and productivity?
• Are health and safety systems realistic?
• Is the workforce involved in all aspects of health and safety?
• Are opportunities for improvement sought and implemented?

Once all of these areas have been evaluated, if a poor health and safety culture is discovered, positive moves to change this should be planned and implemented. Culture per se cannot be altered directly, instead, aspects relating to it, such as management backing and communication need to be enhanced. When it comes to gaining buy in for any culture, employee engagement is key and positive associations with the vision and values of the company will encourage buy in of all policies.

Reacting Positively To Health and Safety – Duct Work Cleaning Professionals Ingot Services

At Ingot Services, with duct work cleaning being a key part of adhering to health and safety law, health and safety is a key aspect of our business, and making sure that we have buy in from the whole team is essential. Putting health and safety at the fore, we safeguard our employees by ensuring that they are well trained to all of the latest standards, and our policies are communicated effectively. With buy in from the top down, a positive attitude to health and safety and the procedures and safeguards we have in place is clear.

Added to this, we ensure our duct work cleaning and other services comply with health and safety legislation – we are HVAC registered, as well as being a member of the Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme and a Safe Contractor Registered company.

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