Health and safety is of course important for the welfare of your staff.  It is also a way of respecting and valuing your staff, in a way that they will hopefully value and reciprocate with goodwill that will help them to help your business.

However there is of course also the really serious legal issue.

Health and safety does not have limited liability, a director cannot say that the company is liable and not them.  This is also the same for other people involved with the business should they cause someone else to get hurt by not doing proper health and safety.    There is not limited liability with companies for health and safety.

An example which helps explain this.   If a person puts up some scaffolding for cleaning a high up area of a building and it collapses, killing the operative who was on it.  If it collapsed because of the person putting it up did not do it properly, it is their fault that it collapsed and the authorities would take them to court personally.  They cannot just expect the company to get the blame and the company cannot fully protect them.

This personal blame also goes up the chain of the business to the management and directors.  If the company that the directors are in charge of, did not do good enough health and safety processes, so that the person putting up the scaffolding was not facilitated properly, the directors of the company are also personally liable for this failing.   So the directors of the business are also personally liable and cannot expect it just to be the company.

Should a person be seriously or fatally injured at work, the local authority will get seriously involved, it is a criminal investigation process that is horrible for anyone to go through.

If there is more than one injury or fatality, or worse of all some sort of trend then the authorities get even more serious with their investigations of the company’s health and safety.  This is even more serious for workers, management and directors.

Written records and documents

A cleaning company should have great health and safety processes, but they also need to have a written record so they can legally prove how they act if there is a government investigation. It also needs to be real as a local authority will also see through a company that has it all on paper, but the things in it are never done in reality.  For example if people sign a form each time they have done something, but they do not actually do it.

It is very easy to outsource health and safety, but the company still needs to be involved to ensure that the company really does the processes and makes it part of what they do.  Health and safety law requires that every site is assessed and so your managers will need to be able to do this to assess all the issues with site, machines and processes at each site.

There was a building company that outsourced their health and safety, each page of their manual started with ‘Make sure you put on your hard had a protective gloves’, however so did the page which had health and safety for making a coffee in the office.  Evidently the health and safety company advising them had just used templates and the company had not gotten involved.

Another example was a company where the operations manual was distributed, but there was a glaring error in them that many of the pages were stapled together so could not be opened properly.  No one came back to report this to the company as no managers or staff had even opened it.

Interestingly a government health and safety inspector who did a talk at a British Institute of cleaning meeting we want to, said that he visits a company, he can tell which ones will grow and succeed.  Those that are good with their health and safety policies tend to be generally capable companies who are good at everything else as well and those are the ones that succeed.

The basic concept

Every risk needs to be assessed, cleaners need to be trained in how to act safely, even if something seems obvious.

If a cleaner has been:

1, Told how to lift heavy things

2, Been shown how to do it in practice,

3, The operative has done it as well with the teacher so the teacher can see that the cleaner has understood

4, The cleaner has been given documentation with a clear diagram and instructions.

5, The cleaner has signed to confirm they have been trained with this training and understood everything.

Then if they have not done it correctly then it is their own fault for not acting as they have been told to and they cannot win by suing the company because it is their own fault.

If they have not been trained and told how to do it, they can blame the company.

So legally and with good management the company is ‘removing the excuses the cleaners can make for not doing things properly’

Even if something seems obvious, sadly it still needs to be said to staff so they cannot make any excuses.

Of course any cleaner can sue a company and the company has to defend itself, but this means the company should win.  Also the cleaner is less likely to do this because they can see and would be advised by any lawyer that the company would win because the correct things have been done.