A recent Linkedin post that I made which asked my network 'Do Safety people need sales skills?' drew quite a lot of attention.

It's interesting how some things just take off like a rocket, and others more like a damp squib.

Clearly people in the HSE industry had strong opinions on this, you can see my post here.

The opinion of my network was pretty conclusive and I think it provides an interesting insight into the HSE profession.

Whilst it is not something we are directly trained in, it is consensus among HSE professionals that we need to know how to sell safety.

'Some people use research like a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination' - David Ogilvy

+50,000 views and 225 comments later, I thought I would review what people had said.

Firstly, of the Yes/No respondents - 82% Yes 18% No

The Top 5 Takeaways.....

1. We generally have to sell 'upwards' and influence 'downwards'

2. Developing our soft skills is critical e.g. relationship-building, empathy, communication, negotiation etc.

3. Our focus should be on understanding 'why', not on saying 'no'.

4. We need to better demonstrate how good H&S benefits people & productivity

5. Listening is more important than talking

Here's a little infographic to summarise what I found....

[ddownload id="2768" text="Do safety people need sales skills?"]

A recent Linkedin post that I made which asked my network 'Do Safety people need sales skills?' drew quite a lot of attention.

It's interesting how some things just take off like a rocket, and others more like a damp squib.

Clearly people in the HSE industry had strong opinions on this, you can see my post here.

The opinion of my network was pretty conclusive and I think it provides an interesting insight into the HSE profession.

Whilst it is not something we are directly trained in, it is consensus among HSE professionals that we need to know how to sell safety.

'Some people use research like a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination' - David Ogilvy

+50,000 views and 225 comments later, I thought I would review what people had said.

Firstly, of the Yes/No respondents - 82% Yes 18% No

The Top 5 Takeaways.....

1. We generally have to sell 'upwards' and influence 'downwards'

2. Developing our soft skills is critical e.g. relationship-building, empathy, communication, negotiation etc.

3. Our focus should be on understanding 'why', not on saying 'no'.

4. We need to better demonstrate how good H&S benefits people & productivity

5. Listening is more important than talking

Here's a little infographic to summarise what I found....

[ddownload id="2768" text="Do safety people need sales skills?"]

Workplace Health and Safety responsibilities for employers have grown consistently over the course of the last 50 years.

Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what your employer is obligated to provide for you in respect to health and safety. Equally, if you employ people, it can feel like a bit of a minefield trying to figure out what you need to do.

At it's most basic level, the Health and Safety at Work Act (UK) gives us a general idea of the minimum expectations in the workplace.

Your duty as an employer under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (HASAWA) and the associated Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations is to provide you with a safe and healthy workplace, and this includes:

This is just a summary of the main requirements relevant to the UK but it does not cover everything! For the latest specific & detailed information on Health and Safety legislation, always consult the UK government website at legislation.gov.uk

Now that you know the key health and safety responsibilities for employers, why not find out the responsibilities of employee's?

We're going to look at the eight key health and safety responsibilities for employers, specifically in the United Kingdom (UK).

And because it all relates back to the Health and Safety at Work Act and the associated regulations, sometimes it's hard to know exactly what you are expected to do, as an employer, in respect to health and safety.

That's something that we're going to shed some light on here with some of the key health and safety responsibilities for employers.

If you employ people, it can feel very difficult and confusing at times trying to figure out what you actually need to be doing for your employees.

At its most basic level, the Health and Safety at Work Act gives us the general idea of what the minimum expectations should be in a workplace. If you are an employer,

Our Essentials Pack for Managers and Supervisors template package includes 16 management templates, how-to-guides & real examples.

Developed by H&S professionals, our essentials bundle has everything you need to set out your H&S policy, arrangements, risk assessments and accident/incident reports.

In this Episode, we outline 10 Ways to Identify Hazards in your workplace. If you are being asked to identify hazards or risk in your place of work, it can seem like a daunting task.

Here at Safeti School, we give you ten easy ways that you can do it, today!

Also, we've even put together a video version for you (see below), if you prefer to watch!

Risk Assessment Beginners Guide - Check out our comprehensive free resource

Risk Assessment Online Course - try out our FREE risk assessment course

Welcome to Safeti School where we crunch down health, safety and environment learning in the simple bite-sized snippets that you can use for your business.

Helping you improve your knowledge, boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let's get started.

In this post, we're going to discuss 10 ways to identify hazards in your workplace just to give you a few ideas. Sometimes when we go hazard spotting and we're thinking about that ways of identifying risk. We sort of come up against a blank and hit a wall in terms of how you actually go about it?

So expanding on what we discussed in an earlier podcast around what a hazard was, I did introduce some ways that you can actually start looking at relevant items in your business. We're just going to explore that and rattle through 10 ways to identify hazards in more depth.

First of all, a very obvious one, just walk around. Go out and identify activities, processes & substances that can actually cause injury or ill health to employees. That's a useful starting point. You gotta get out there and get your hands dirty, so to speak. It will give you a good idea of the scope and how much detail you're going to need to get into.

You will have to bear in mind that you're only really taking a snapshot at a certain point in time. So you may miss things that aren't happening on an ongoing basis. Make sure to have a good rummage around. Look in places that aren't so obvious.

People have a very good knack of putting equipment, especially that which maybe isn't used often, in places where you can't see it.

And even stuff that shouldn't be used as well!

Give yourself enough time to look in the places that are normally blind to you. Those are often the places where hidden risks can exist.

The second is simply observation of specific work activities. This is something that may take some time depending on what you're dealing with.

You will want to make sure that you're watching a full cycle of work or even multiple cycles of work, if necessary.

You might want to look at different people doing the same task, for example, because that can be really useful to see the variation of how the work is actually performed and undertaken. From that, you can use it to help you identify any hazards that might exist.

Either from the way it is meant to be done or the way it is being done (might not be the same thing!).

So thirdly, part and parcel of the observation process should be, and it's absolutely essential, to speak to your employees.

Get engaged with your employees, ask them to explain after you've you've observed how they do their work.

Why they're actually doing it that way?

What sort of things are they being asked to do?

Have they enough support and resources to do the work?

Whether they feel as if there's any danger

Welcome to Safeti School, were we crunch down Environment, Health and Safety learning into simple, bite-size snippets that you can use for your business.

In this Episode, we outline how to get more engagement from your HSE communications. Do you feel like you are talking into an echo chamber? Or that your not getting enough feedback to help you push forward? Listen to this one for a quick example of what good looks like.

Create a Story - 5 steps to create a compelling narrative for your communication

You might also like: 3 Essentials for Effective Training

[00:00:04] Welcome to Safeti school where we crunch down health safety and the environment learning into simple bitesize snippets that you can use for your business. Helping you improve your knowledge, boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let's get started.

[00:00:22] Hi there, in this episode we're gonna look at a little example as to how you can go about increasing and improving your engagement with your communications to your team.

When we learn something new whether that be an improvement to safety practice, how to improve sustainability in our operations or if we've come across a new well-being hack for our workforce that we want to share. We naturally feel motivated and excited about communicating with people and sharing it because we care about them and we want to improve our performance and make a positive difference. Whether you be an HSE professional or a manager/supervisor, it doesn't really matter.

Most of the time whenever we deliver or implement a communication piece we're not really sure how impactful or effective it's actually been.

Have you ever delivered a message or sent the communication out and felt like it's been ignored or that you're talking into an echo chamber. There's been no feedback and you're just really heading and hoping without knowing how effective it actually is.

Most of us have an experience of this and of course that's not the outcome we want or doesn't give us any reassurance that what we're doing actually has a positive impact. So let's take a look at an example of how we can improve our levels of engagement with our messaging.

Imagine you're a site manager and you're delivering an important safety communications to your team. There's recently been a serious near miss where someone could have been severely injured or killed on your site involving a crane. The next morning after the event you want to make sure that your workers know that you've taken the incident seriously and you pulled some information from the internet on crane safety that you want to communicate to them.

So you start into your chat about the 10 Rules of crane safety. Talking and reading from the information that you got online. As you're doing it you start realizing that people are looking at the floor, their eyes are glazed over and they are turning their heads & checking their phones. Some of them are even starting to chat amongst themselves.

Understandably you're starting to get really frustrated at their lack of attention toward something that's really serious. Should you accept that? Maybe you're thinking it's just the way they are. They don't care. Can you change that outcome.? Why don't you challenge them?

Maybe you don't feel confident in what you're trying to communicate to them. How does that make you feel? You know the message isn't getting through. That you failed in your task an

Welcome to Safeti School, were we crunch down Environment, Health and Safety learning into simple, bite-size snippets that you can use for your business.

In this Episode, we outline how to get more engagement from your HSE communications. Do you feel like you are talking into an echo chamber? Or that your not getting enough feedback to help you push forward? Listen to this one for a quick example of what good looks like.

Create a Story - 5 steps to create a compelling narrative for your communication

You might also like: 3 Essentials for Effective Training

[00:00:04] Welcome to Safeti school where we crunch down health safety and the environment learning into simple bitesize snippets that you can use for your business. Helping you improve your knowledge, boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let's get started.

[00:00:22] Hi there, in this episode we're gonna look at a little example as to how you can go about increasing and improving your engagement with your communications to your team.

When we learn something new whether that be an improvement to safety practice, how to improve sustainability in our operations or if we've come across a new well-being hack for our workforce that we want to share. We naturally feel motivated and excited about communicating with people and sharing it because we care about them and we want to improve our performance and make a positive difference. Whether you be an HSE professional or a manager/supervisor, it doesn't really matter.

Most of the time whenever we deliver or implement a communication piece we're not really sure how impactful or effective it's actually been.

Have you ever delivered a message or sent the communication out and felt like it's been ignored or that you're talking into an echo chamber. There's been no feedback and you're just really heading and hoping without knowing how effective it actually is.

Most of us have an experience of this and of course that's not the outcome we want or doesn't give us any reassurance that what we're doing actually has a positive impact. So let's take a look at an example of how we can improve our levels of engagement with our messaging.

Imagine you're a site manager and you're delivering an important safety communications to your team. There's recently been a serious near miss where someone could have been severely injured or killed on your site involving a crane. The next morning after the event you want to make sure that your workers know that you've taken the incident seriously and you pulled some information from the internet on crane safety that you want to communicate to them.

So you start into your chat about the 10 Rules of crane safety. Talking and reading from the information that you got online. As you're doing it you start realizing that people are looking at the floor, their eyes are glazed over and they are turning their heads & checking their phones. Some of them are even starting to chat amongst themselves.

Understandably you're starting to get really frustrated at their lack of attention toward something that's really serious. Should you accept that? Maybe you're thinking it's just the way they are. They don't care. Can you change that outcome.? Why don't you challenge them?

Maybe you don't feel confident in what you're trying to communicate to them. How does that make you feel? You know the message isn't getting through. That you failed in your task and you had good intentions at the start but you've lost all engagement with your audience.

Welcome to Safeti School, were we crunch down Environment, Health and Safety learning into simple, bite-size snippets that you can use for your business.

In this Episode we outline 3 of our favourite tips to help you boost the impact of your workplace health and safety training. Check out a couple of related resources below from the episode and the transcript if you would like to read the content.

Generational Learning Preferences - find out more about the preferences of a baby boomer, millenial or Gen Z'er when it comes to learning delivery.

More Health and Safety Training Tips - check out our guest blog from my buddy Alex Burbidge of Pro Safety Management

Free Risk Assessment Course - join our online workplace health and safety training course for free

Health and Safety Services - find out more about how Safeti can help you with Health and Safety

Safeti Shop – pay a visit to our store for professional templates and guidance

Safeti School - for more free, educational HSE content visit the Safeti School podcast page

Connect with Us - follow the Safeti page on Linkedin

Welcome to Safeti school where we crunch down health safety and environment learning in this simple bite-size Snippets that you can use for your business helping you improve your knowledge boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let's get started.

Hi there, and thanks for joining us in this episode. We're going to give you three of our top tips to help you deliver better workplace health and safety training for your employees. You'll have to excuse me if I cough or splutter during this during this session due to my current head cold or allergies, which it can't seem to get rid of but will crack on.

So firstly in terms of looking at the planning of your training session, make sure that your content is pitched at a suitable technical level for your whole audience. This is quite key. Otherwise, you can lose either sections of your audience or your whole audience completely when it comes to delivery.

Make sure that the learning is developed according to their existing knowledge. It's also equally important to understand that if you put groups of people into your training room that have a huge variance in terms of their existing knowledge.

Then the chances are that you're going to either pitch your training too high or too low and lose one of those groups completely from your engagement.

Whenever you're planning who is to receive the training, just be aware of that as well, I would say.

Make sure you're not, for example, putting HSE professionals with you know, interns that have just come through the door and have no background knowledge or appreciation of the subject matter. This does happen quite a bit and it's something that can be easily missed. Try not to fall into that trap would be my advice.

Secondly, whenever you're considering your audience, I would pay some attention to the actual age of your audience.

And without wanting to sound ageist here, it's well known that different generations have differ