Innovative compliance: summarising official guidance with our new image library

Coronavirus has certainly put an extra strain on health and safety professionals. Reading long and complicated guidance documents is a tedious activity at the best of times, and communicating these clearly to your workforce is easier said than done. We decided to take some of the burden off your shoulders and give you a helping hand.

Having read all (yes, all) of the official Covid guidance from the government and the CLC site operating procedures, we designed a library of images demonstrating Covid-secure operations in the workplace. Instead of a 20-page document, it’s all there in a few easy steps and pictures. Created in collaboration with our EHS expert Rob Bullen and our illustrator, our visuals show examples of safe deliveries, travel to work, Covid-symptoms, site access and egress, and more. 

Exceed expectations: towards a pragmatic approach for safety

Health and safety documentation is often motivated by legal compliance as a bare minimum, and can be seen as a red-tape hurdle to keep the HSE happy. However, the law is there for a reason: to keep people safe. A dry and dense RAMS (risk assessment and method statement) may hold up in court, but will your operatives read and understand it? With many workers not being native English speakers, images convey information in a way that is universally understood. Furthermore, dyslexia, which often affects one’s reading ability, is estimated to affect as many as 20,000 construction workers in the UK and up to 10% of the population. 

Research indicates that including visual aids in a task description help reduce errors by 80 percent. This motivated us to build the ability to create pictorial RAMS, and add images to the sequence of operations, which are clear step-by-step task instructions. A good document structure, clear formatting and providing visual cues makes documents dramatically easier to read for everyone, and ensures your RAMS fulfill their original purpose.

Adding Covid-images to your RAMS

Free for all HandsHQ customers, our Covid image library is already live on your account (unless you have a bespoke library - please contact support). Once you have selected the relevant Covid risk assessments, the following section, sequence of operations, will contain our image library, ready for you to use. Read more about the new Covid content here.

Moving forward

Together with our new sequence of operations and Covid-19 risk assessments, we have created a compliant summary of the official Covid guidance in an engaging and inclusive format. We hope you find this useful and informative. Good design is at the heart of HandsHQ and we strongly believe it can transform health and safety to become more engaging and practical.

You can also add your own images to any sequence: simply click ‘Add image’ next to the relevant step to create your own pictorial RAMS. Why not use the slowdown over the Christmas period to review how you can make your documents more visual and user friendly?