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Nigel Valvona is health and safety director at Halcrow and chairs ACE’s Health and Safety Group. He spoke with Impact editor Gavin Pearson about practical support for members and new schemes to educate young people.
“ACE has hundreds of small organisations who need support with issues like health and safety,” he explained. “Large firms can afford a team of experts in the field. Smaller firms cannot, and ACE is in a position to help.”
With that in mind he wants to see the Health and Safety Group work for the membership. “We have several large companies in the group, so we have nationwide resource with which to improve health and safety practice across the country.”
The group has embarked on an experiment with virtual meetings, piloting a practice that other ACE groups may seek to follow.
Nigel explains why this is valuable. “We meet once every three months, which often seems a long period between discussions. Virtual meetings allow us to catch up a little more regularly without the difficulty of arranging a time and location that suits everyone.”
He also notes the potential of such methods for expanding the group in future. “As the group seeks to serve ACE’s smaller members more and more, we want them to be better involved with the group. Small members are often unable to spare resources for something like a regular health and safety meeting. But if we can move meetings online the time constraints become more manageable.”
It is practical measures that Mr Valvona sees as particularly important to an industry in which safety is a key issue. So he is pleased to be able to talk about a recent successful development with the British Safety Council.
“The Health and Safety Forum, which brings together some of the industry’s large firms, was able to pick up on work done by the British Safety Council. It can be very important to get the message across while people are young rather than introducing it new to people only when they enter the workforce.
“That work saw development of a new certificate that was tested by the British Safety Council that we felt would help to strengthen awareness and get key messages across.”
The project was successful, in part because the certificate carried points through the pupil’s academic career rather than standing alone.
“With students taking an interest we wanted to build on our success. So several companies started work on making consultants available to schools to help them resource the work.”
Nigel is particularly pleased that development did not stop there, and is looking to ensure further progress can continue to be funded.
“We looked at how best to make consultants available and developed plans to build health and safety into a work experience programme.
“This has worked really well. Over one week pupils can learn about the work of consultant engineers with a constant focus on health and safety awareness. The British Safety Council modified the certificate to suit this way of working and still marks the test that comes at the end of the week.
“Best of all it is still free for employers to sign up. Packs for the training are provided and support is offered for relevant staff.”
Communicating health and safety
ACE’s Health and Safety Group has issued a new guide entitled “Effective Health and Safety Communication”.
The new guide is designed for those in the construction industry who need to communicate a health and safety message to their workforce, whether direct employees or other staff working on site.
Communicating effectively to a diverse workforce is not easy, but doing it well can have remarkable results. People who may find the guide useful include site managers, safety officers, foremen and directors.
The full guide includes important points to take into account when communicating about health and safety, though further support should always be sought where needed.
Top tips for effective communication
These top ten tips form a summary section of ACE Health and Safety Group’s new “Effective Health and Safety Communication” guide.
- Clearly identify your aim(s).
- Know what you want to achieve and set realistic, measureable objectives.
- Decide what your messages will be.
- Understand clearly who the message is for.
- Consider using several different ways to communicate the same message.
- Use appendix ‘A’ to generate ideas and help select the best option for your audience.
- Consider who should deliver it, and what credibility they have - a good message badly delivered is lost.
- Consider whether the communication was effective. Never check understanding by simply asking – “do you understand?” You will almost always get a “yes” answer. It is preferable to ask something like – “so how will you do the task now?”, or “what does this [the subject] mean for you?”
- Plan your method of evaluating success before delivering the communication activity.
- To communicate effectively, keep it simple; you only have about 30 seconds to capture someone’s attention, and will only keep it for about 20 minutes!
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