Health and safety with Nviro: why it matters for us, and what it means for you
01 June 2024 Category: Nviro News Schools, Academies and Trusts
Health and safety is a bit like the lock on your front door: you may not really think about it each day, but if it’s not working, there’s a problem. You need access, and you need control of that access. It’s similar with potentially hazardous chemicals and equipment: you need access to them to keep your buildings clean, hygienic and safe, but cleaning teams also need to navigate their use in a controlled way. At Nviro, our colleagues are our most vital part of what we do, and we want to ensure that their health and safety – and that of your building users – is monitored, controlled and prioritised in all areas. This reduces any risk to an absolute minimum.
The Nviro approach
We adopt the “four C’s” approach when it comes to health and safety.
- Competence – ensuring all colleagues are trained to work with absolute safety.
- Control – making the responsibilities of cleaners completely clear, and ensuring adequate supervision.
- Cooperation – so that multiple bodies can work together for on-site collaboration.
- Communication – so that up-to-date training and information can keep cleaners aware of best practise.
Alongside this, when we begin working with a new client, we make sure to do a thorough site survey beforehand. This means we get a thorough understanding of the cleaning requirements of the site, but we also get to monitor what cleaning teams are doing. It’s not uncommon that bad habits emerge over the years in some companies, and when those habits risk the safety of our cleaners, we weed them out immediately.
We make sure our cleaners know how to maintain standards comprehensively, and they know what steps to take if anything goes wrong. As a result, we not only ensure the safety of our employees, but we enhance the quality of our service, too.
How we go above and beyond standard procedures
1- COSHH
It’s not just the way we interact with our clients and cleaners that we’re proud of. It’s in the areas that add layers of protection to both. When it comes to health and safety, obviously we PAT test our equipment – everyone does – but not everyone uses the systems that we have found to work the best in our 30 years of professional cleaning.
You’ve probably seen the COSHH posters or booklets in the cleaning cupboards of schools up and down the country. But charts go missing, and they are limited. Safety requisites change with time. And when new chemicals are made available, how do we keep up to date?
The answer for Nviro has been to use a COSHH management system that provides accurate guides for cleaners at scale. These guides are easy to access on any device, easy to follow, and bespoke to the products our cleaning teams have and the tasks they need to complete.
Our Safety Team creates the COSHH assessments – providing information on what activity a chemical will be used for, and how much, how often, and the daily exposure details. Then our system generates COSHH sheets that contain everything a cleaner would need to know: health hazards, how to respond to emergency spills or fires, what equipment they need, and so on. This information is then automatically updated on our cleaner’s app.
We review our COSHH regularly so cleaners have a targeted range of products that cleaners can access. This also helps to identify if any chemicals can be retired – we’ve removed 54 legacy chemicals in our time!
Simply put, our process gives our cleaning teams what they need to consistently select the right products, the right PPE (if required), and clean with the right approach.
2 – Near misses and investigations
Keeping cleaners up to date on best practise isn’t to say that accidents never happen, but we take further steps to mitigate the risks. Simply put, we don’t want anything bad to happen to anyone who uses a building, and as a result, we take a comprehensive and robust approach to accidents or near misses.
If there is a near miss, the colleague responsible will immediately telephone to inform the Cleaning Manager. They will contact the Safety Team on the same day to log the incident and receive guidance on the investigation procedure. The investigation procedure is designed to identify the root cause of the incident, and we use that information to make sure it can never happen again.
A near-miss intervention today prevents an accident tomorrow, so ensuring a quick way of responding is vital. For us, that means QR codes in cleaning cupboards, which means cleaners can highlight potential accidents before they become big issues.
3 – Taking responsibility at every level
It’s not just having the reporting that counts. It’s how well we respond to the information.
Sometimes this is a matter of responding in the moment. For instance, recently, we discovered that some cleaning teams were unable to take bin bags out to the large, landfill bins safely. They worked at night, and full hands meant they could no longer use their torches. Our immediate response was to provide any night cleaners with headlamps, and we were able to continue ensuring the safety of our cleaners.
We also have wider processes in place to identify how we can act. At Nviro we see it as our responsibility to track accident trends to understand the risks to employees. Nviro’s People Director and our external consultant actively examine trends in these areas, and they are reviewed at quarterly health and safety committee meetings.
This process establishes a clear channel of communication between our on-site colleagues and management team. It also enables our management team to promptly respond to any health and safety incidents, and ultimately, our Managing Director assumes full accountability for health and safety management. The health and safety of our cleaners are important, and to us, that means keeping health and safety accounted for at all levels.
If you’d like to learn more about how we look after the health and safety of our cleaning teams and your building users, get in touch – you’ll find out we’ve got you covered.
As a specialist cleaning provider in educational settings, Nviro provides clean, hygienic and safe environments in universities, colleges and schools. Read our blog ‘The value of a specialist cleaning team: A quick guide for Financial Directors’.
