SHEQ Africa » Promoting Sustainable Business Management

Health and Safety: Truths or Urban Myths

In the United Kingdom (UK), Health and Safety often gets a bad press - In fact, you might be forgiven for wondering how anything actually gets done given the raft of Safety rules and regulations reported in their national papers.
Health and Safety is regulated through the Health and Safety at Work Act, a short and simple piece of legislation dating from 1974, which states that employers have a duty to secure the Health, Safety and welfare of people at work …

ISO27001 Explained

So you thought that you are not working with this standard and that it is not applicable to you? Think again – information security is defined as the “preservation of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information; in addition, other properties such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation and reliability can also be involved”. Do incident investigation documentation, medical examinations, confidential HR documentation and disciplinary hearings. Incident statistics, monitoring and measurement results, etc. not fall into this category? Â
An information security management …

Effective SHEQ Leadership Qualities

Who do you look up to? Who do you admire? Who stands out in your life as the person that made a difference? Why? This last question is the difference between a leader and the average Joe. People that fall in this category would include amongst others Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, etc..
Who do you look up to in the safety, health, environmental and quality field? How good is your SHEQ leadership within …

OHS blamed for extinction of office Christmas parties

The office Christmas party is dying out because of fears that workers could sue over other employees’ drunken antics and a prevailing “Scrooge” mentality in Britain. A third of companies will not hold a staff party this year, twice as many as in 2002.

A Chartered Management Institute (CMI) survey of more than 500 British managers found that more than half believe the atmosphere at end-of-year celebrations …

“His car is here but he is nowhere to be found”

Today I want to refer to the recent Durban oil blaze and my previous post about Bad PR- The Risk that got away.
On 2007-9-19Â an article was posted to the web at 24.com NEWS:
Durban - One person was reported missing following a blaze at the Island View storage depot in Durban on Wednesday.
Managing director of Island View Storage, Kobus Ehlers, confirmed that …

7 Reasons why New Employees Get Injured

Business Legal Reports has published a new report.
According to them, forty percent of employees injured at work in the U.S. have been on the job for less than a year.
It seems like a high percentage, doesn’t it?
It is their opinion that new employees lack the knowledge and experience that is gathered by workers who have spent more time on the job.
They provide the following seven reasons why this is the case:

Employers assume that new employees know …

Your SHEQ Career – Set Goals with Focus

Like everything in live, things just tend to work out better if you take the time to set some goals first. Your career is no exception.
Much as we would all like to use a magic wand that put us instantly right where we want to be, in the perfect situation, surrounded by the right people, in reality we have to work towards it. A remarkable career in SHEQ will take many years of preparation and hard work to accomplish.
How do …

Enterprise Wide Risk Management: Explained

What is Enterprise-Wide Risk Management?
Looking at Risk Management from a Health & Safety point of view have changed over the past few years to include Environmental aspect and impact (hazard & risk) management as well. Lately it has been broadened to include Information Security risks (ISO27001), Food risks (ISO22001), HIV & AIDS risks (SANS16001) and Business Continuity (ISO25001). Overseeing the risk of an entire organization is the cherry on top of any risk management system. This is where the …

Yada, yada, ya…and then I was stunned.

So I was reading an article about the findings of a new study on Office rage over at The Scotsman.
Yada, yada, yada…
The study found that eight out of ten office workers in the UK have witnessed acts of visible anger when colleagues become overcome with the frustrations of modern office life.
The principal causes of rage, according to the research, were long and pointless meetings followed by the ill manners of colleagues and office politics.
Taking the …

A closer look at Work Permits

Work Permits defined
A Work Permit is a written form giving authorization to jobs that can expose employees to serious Hazards & Risks in the Workplace.
It identifies the work to be done, what the Hazards to be encountered in this task are, and the preparations and precautions needed according to the job to be performed.
Examples of jobs needing Work Permits are: employees entering confined spaces to perform certain tasks, repairing, maintaining and inspecting electrical installations or using large complex equipment. Â …