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All businesses must comply with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) by making their business premises accessible for people with disabilities. Failure to comply has legal and business consequences.

About 16% of the UK adult population has some kind of disability. This rises to 45% of adults over the state pension age. If these customers cannot access your building, you are losing sales. It has been estimated that disabled and elderly people spend £60bn a year, so anything that puts these cu...

Research by law firm Hugh James has revealed that 16% of workers are employed in businesses where they have had no fire drills.

A recent poll of 2,000 employees found that nearly half did not know what to do in the event of a fire. This indicates that many employers are not taking fire safety training seriously.

Lack of fire training could not only put workers’ safety at risk, but could also be costly financially. In 2009, the New Look retail store in London caught fire. A member of staff comp...

Manual handling can cause musculoskeletal disorders that can result in workers being unable to do their job. By using access and materials handling equipment, manual handling can be reduced.

Exoskeleton wearable technology is being developed that supplements the wearer’s muscle power to make manual handling easier. Some industries are even looking at how to replace manual handling workers with fully automated technology.

Workers installing overhead line electrification on Britain’s railways n...

Regulations make it compulsory to assess all workplaces for fire risks. After the initial assessment there is no fixed period to review it, but many businesses review fire risk assessments at yearly intervals. A business should designate an employee to continually monitor fire risks.

If there are changes to the workplace buildings or the number of employees increases, then a business must assess how this affects fire risks. Changes such as constructing mezzanine floors, adding warehouse shelvi...

Most offices have several recycling bins for materials such as cans, glass and paper. A new invention, however, aims to cut down the time needed to sort items by replacing office recycle bins with just one container.

The Bin.E smart bin has a series of sensors and cameras that recognise distinct types of rubbish. The rectangular bin has one opening where the rubbish goes. As it falls through the top of the bin, rubbish is automatically sorted and sent to one of four smaller recycling bins plac...

Safety signs have been used for decades to warn people about dangers, and in the UK, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) communicates the guidance and design of the signs.

Rather than being text-heavy, safety signs use symbols that can be easily be recognised. Civilizations have been communicating using pictorial symbols for thousands of years, with Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and runes being examples of communicating via symbols.

The first mass use of signs was on Britain’s roads. The Ro...

The Japanese government has launched a campaign to improve working environments in the country, in an effort to make workplaces healthier for Japanese workers.

This has accelerated the development of new types of office furniture that encourages workers to be more active while they work in the office.

The Kokuyo Company in Osaka has created new office chairs that it calls the “ing”. It has a gliding seat that inclines in every direction as an office worker shifts their body. To remain on t...

New Canadian storage rack guidelines could help British businesses

From January 2018, new guidelines come into force in Canada that affect the installation and use of steel storage racks.

Though the guidelines are aimed at Canadian businesses, most of them are common sense and could form the basis of best safety practices for British companies. The guidelines can be downloaded here.

Steel racks include warehouse shelving, pallet racking and cantilever racks, all of which are commonly found in...

The majority of office workers spend as much time seated in a chair as they do in bed. Sedentary jobs can be damaging to workers’ health, but if office workers sit in high-quality, ergonomically designed office chairs, health risks can be minimised.

Sitting at a desk and working on a computer is not a natural activity, so workers can suffer from such conditions as back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoarthritis, poor posture and eye strain. Most of these health problems take a while to develo...

Even if your work processes do not involve much physical labour, if your workers are required to perform any degree of manual lifting and carrying, you need manual handling procedures. Aside from providing the correct lifting equipment, sack trucks, and trolleys, workers need to be trained in how to actually perform the task.

Covering all processes of lifting, pushing or lowering physical objects by hand, manual handling tasks are common within trades such as construction, but any environment ...