The main safety challenge that’s posed by a mobile workforce is the variable nature of the locations they are working in.
Unlike an office worker, the potential risks they face are constantly changing as the environment they’re working in changes. This is what makes risk assessment such an essential requirement.
To manage this challenge, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) advises businesses to adopt a five-stage assessment process. Here’s a closer look:
A general need to carry out risk assessments falls under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. This means that all employers must:
The law requires you to ensure that assessments made are ‘suitable and sufficient’ with proper checks made, the relevant people consulted and adequate actions put in place.
The level of detail contained in a risk assessment should be ‘proportionate to the risk and appropriate to the nature of the work’.
For mobile workers, insignificant and routine risks can be ignored. It’s only when an activity or environment significantly alters risks that fresh assessments are needed.
Along with a general assessment, different industry sectors will have their own guidance. For highway operations, assessments are covered by the GG 104 requirements of the DRMB.
The five-step HSE assessment provides a good place to start when building an effective process.
What are the tasks your workers are required to do and what are the potential risks they are likely to face? This needs to cover the various activities they do and the locations where they take place.
So typical activities that need to be assessed include:
Assessments should take into account the general environments in which field workers operate. Mobile workers should also have the knowledge and training they need to assess risks.
With digital workforce management systems, handheld devices and smartphone apps can be used to integrate real-time assessments into the workflow.
For each potential hazard identified, who is at risk? The duty of care is not just for employees but for anyone who could be harmed, such as contractors or members of the public.
This doesn’t mean naming individuals but to generally identify the type of person who’s at risk. The level of risk may also depend on the type of worker and the amount of experience and training they have.
So you know what the hazards are and who’s at risk. Now, you need to make a judgement on the level of risk posed and what the appropriate action should be.
This should be guided by basic common sense and an understanding of the need to do everything ‘reasonably practicable’ to protect people. It’s a judgement call which balances risks against the cost and time practicalities of control measures.
Ideally, you want to eliminate risks. If that’s not possible then risks need to be controlled to an acceptable level.
Workers need to be a part of this process to identify the most effective solutions and to ensure that any measures taken are not going to create additional hazards.
Practical steps could include:
It’s a legal requirement to document this process for all businesses with more than five employees. This doesn’t have to be an exhaustive document but a general record of what hazards exist, who’s at risk and what actions you are taking.
The HSE provides a template document to help manage this. Whatever form it takes, the risk assessment document needs to be clear, concise and accessible.
To be accepted as ‘suitable and sufficient’ it needs to show that:
The risks facing mobile workers are constantly changing so assessments need to be regularly reviewed and updated. Are the actions you have put in place working?
The worst possible way to identify a problem is when accidents or injuries occur. So the object of a review is to identify and tackle any issues before they are allowed to become problems.
But whenever an incident is reported, the circumstances need to be reviewed. What could have been done to prevent it from happening?
The general areas that a review should cover includes:
Real-time tracking and automated processes allowed safety checks and risk assessments to be integrated into a field workers daily routine. MyMobileWorkers makes the enforcement of checks simple with tasks managed on-site via a handheld device.