Richard Lamb recently joined Woods as their Health and Safety Manager. He initially began his career in regulatory compliance and standards before moving to working across various workplace health and safety settings. Richard brings to the team years of experience working in public and workplace health and safety.
As Health and Safety Manager, I will be guiding Woods to maintain good practice, remain current and ensure that health and safety expertise is embedded into our and our client’s operations.
Our focus should be on positive outcomes for people and working together. Work should be uplifting and rewarding and a simple human error should not impact lives and livelihoods in a damaging way.
If I have learnt one thing, it is the importance of integrating basic health and safety concepts and principles into the way we do things with an understanding that this contributes to great performance and service delivery.
Care before compliance
Health and safety is sometimes seen as a barrier to performance, but in reality, it’s the opposite. When done well, it drives performance and enables us to deliver excellent service.
After spending a lot of time in regulatory compliance, I have a good understanding of people and organisations and what they need to do in order to deliver on their health and safety promises.
What it comes down to is simple – caring and sharing. We all share a common interest in work; all compliance requirements ask us to do is care. After all, health and safety is an ethical duty. At Woods, we hold that belief strongly in our values and behaviour.
The three pillars of good work
We deliver on our promise through the three pillars of good work:
- Proactive and visible leadership at all levels.
- Being mindful that everyone has a common interest and ensuring everyone has a say.
- Ensuring everyone knows the basics of how to turn uncontrolled hazards into controlled risks using good practice and embracing continuous improvement.
Understanding that having robust health and safety systems is something we should all be boasting about. Moreover, we should be upfront about shortcomings with the intention of fixing them. We need to dismantle any fears about openly discussing health and safety in order to better enhance it and deliver on our health and safety duties.
Health and safety keeps the show on the road
While not always obvious, health and safety has played a significant role in our everyday lives.
Over the last 50 years, cars and other vehicles have not just become faster and more efficient, they are now much safer. Safety features, driver competence and the quality of roading have all improved over this time. We still have a way to go.
In our industry, we have applied health and safety principles went using drones to do survey work in high-risk areas like rail corridors, keeping our surveyors in a safe place while doing their work.
The true value of having robust health and safety practices that everyone is involved in came when the curtains came down for the pandemic.
Delivering health and safety procedures with urgency while also trying to navigate the waters of COVID-19 initially felt like a daunting task. However, by applying basic health and safety principles, supported by the three pillars of good work, showed us how to successfully manage work and protect people from catching and spreading the virus.
The future of health and safety at Woods
My mission is to invest in the sustainable success of Woods, our people and our clients by seeking to improve processes and systems to drive the value we get from good health and safety practices.
I also want to grow our service offer and contribute to providing practical solutions to our clients. I have a great interest in operational efficiency and love seeing things working well. I struggle when health and safety is given as a reason why people ‘can’t’ do something.
It’s about using our human instinct to do the right thing to remove barriers and achieve successful outcomes.