Ten Tips for making your workplace safer

1.  Recruit a Safety Rep

Trade union safety reps make work safer. They are the eyes and ears of the workplace campaigning to make their colleagues working life safer. To find out more about becoming a safety rep read our guide Safety in Numbers. 

2.  Plan a safety rep inspection
Union safety reps have a legal right to inspect the workplace areas they cover at least once every three months. Remember to give your employer reasonable written notice (one week should suffice) and try and doing it jointly with them.

Read our safety reps inspection guide.

3.  Hold a union meeting
Ask your Health & Safety Rep or Steward to hold a union meeting to raise awareness about health and safety, discuss a particular issue, or to listen to members’ concerns. If you think it will help encourage people to attend, consider holding it during lunchtime or ask the employer to allow staff to attend during their work time. You could also invite non-members too – they might be interested in joining UNISON.

To find out more about campaigning and organizing around health & safety read our guide Safety in Numbers.

4.  Carry out a body or risk mapping exercise
These are great ways of identifying work hazards, breaking down barriers, and involving workers who might not otherwise report an issue or participate. They can be a fun exercise to do together and you end up with a visual record which may be easier to analyse – lots of problems in one place may help to sort out the priorities.

Put simply they involve using a drawing of a body or the workplace upon which health and safety concerns can be marked. On a body map staff would be asked to mark the areas where aches and pains, injuries, or diagnosed health concerns occur. On a map of the workplace, they may mark incidents recorded in the accident book, reasons given for sickness absence, and/or any other incidents or issues of concern that workers can recall.

5.  Do a survey of employees (both members and non-members of UNISON) to see what health and safety concerns they may have
Ask your Health & Safety Rep to do a short survey in your workplace.  It could be a simply as emailing staff and asking them to list, in order, their top five health and safety concerns. You could make it even easier by supplying a list of 10 issues and asking them to rank their top five in order.

6.  Check for musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), repetitive strain or back injuries in your workplace
Use the safety rep checklist in the UNISON Leaflet Aches, pains and strains to check for MSDs in your workplace.  Your Health & Safety Rep can use the list when carrying out inspections, reviewing risk assessments or simply talking to members and other staff.

7.  Use the Health & Safety Executive’s Management Standards to do a stress audit and risk assessment. To find out more about doing this read our UNISON Stress Toolkit.

8.  Ask the employer to jointly review or develop a risk assessment, policy, and/or procedure
Read the UNISON guide on risk assessments for advice on how employers should be conducting risk assessments, and share your knowledge with them to make sure that they are fit for purpose.

9.  Email or distribute our health and safety guides and leaflets aimed at members
Ask your Health & Safety Rep for one of our many guides and pamphlets for members. These aim to inform and raise awareness so that you can identify if there’s a problem and suggest what employers and staff side can do to fix them. 

10.  Just talk about health and safety!
We know you are all busy having to balance the demands of your job.  However, if you don’t have time for any of the above make sure you use at least part of the week, however small, to have a chat with other members, colleagues or your manager about health and safety. Use the week to make health and safety matter!