Gritting Services – Not Just About Grit

We often connect gritting services with the visual aspects of it – such as staff in trucks turning up in the early hours to grit car parks, walkways, steps and ramps – but there is far more to this than meets the eye.

In fact gritting services are involved in a lot more than spreading grit when the weather turns icy; they are also there to provide you with the health and safety protection your business needs, including thorough risk management.

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Health and Safety – A Risk Management Approach

An effective gritting service needs to provide not just grit, but also a full risk management service. Businesses have a legal obligation to do all they can to protect anyone on their premises from harm, and this includes preventing injuries from falls due to the icy conditions. Although it is not possible to eliminate all accidents entirely, it is the job of a company or organisation to carry out a thorough risk assessment at the workplace to identify likely, or possible, accidents that may occur - and to put measures in place to address those risks.

Health and safety is all about making the workplace safer to protect staff and customers. It is vital to show that you have taken every reasonable precaution to prevent injuries. With Ice Watch gritting services you have complete peace of mind as we provide a full risk management service – so you don’t have to - and we keep full and accurate records to demonstrate you have taken proper steps towards making your business an accident free zone.

Key Elements of Risk Management

There are all sorts of elements involved in risk management and we shall outline some of those here.

Identifying a Risk – You can’t manage a risk until it has been properly identified. To identify risk you need a thorough risk assessment, preferably by someone impartial, such as a third party expert specifically trained to notice possible risks. A third party is more likely to spot potential risks, such as a slight slope at the front door that goes unnoticed by staff but which can become a major slipping risk when it gets icy. Ice Watch carry out a thorough risk assessment as standard and this includes all the proper documentation to demonstrate the steps you have made to identify risks.

Taking Action – Just documenting a risk is not enough. You actually need a fully documented action plan in place to address the risk – one that clearly identifies who is responsible for each action and in what circumstances. If it is an in-house action plan, this means naming the individuals responsible and specifying what happens when the person is on leave, off sick, or simply can’t get into work on the day the icy conditions strike. Companies either need a back-up arrangement, or risk no one taking vital action. By organising a dedicated gritting service, back up is guaranteed and contracting out means the responsibility lies with your gritting contractor, instead of you.

Ongoing Monitoring – Risk management relating to ice and snow at your business does not mean gritting once, and forgetting about it. It involves ongoing monitoring and using the information obtained from this monitoring to trigger action when needed. Full and accurate records must be taken at every step of the way. In winter time, ongoing monitoring involves daily and sometimes hourly checking of local temperatures and forecasts. This also involves overnight monitoring. So consider whether you have the resources to allocate someone in your company to do this. Most companies cannot allocate personnel for this, so Ice Watch takes this responsibility off your hands and not only does the monitoring for you, but fully documents it, contacting you as and when gritting is necessary.

Avoiding New Risks - Let’s suppose there are some hardy types in your company who are quite willing to go outside with snow shovels or bags of grit and take care of your winter gritting. This may at first look like a good solution. But what happens – and this is most likely the case – if the weather indicates your gritting needs to take place at 3am? Will they be willing to come into work at 3am? And even if they are, do you then expect them to go on to complete a normal, full working day? Creating a situation where your workers are fatigued for their normal duties could create an additional risk, particularly for any type of manual work.

Insurance – One of the biggest potential risks to a business is a successful liability claim against you. Having to pay thousands, and even in some cases hundreds of thousands of pounds to an injured party can be enough to wipe out a small company in one stroke. Of course businesses can take out their own insurance, but this means creating additional overheads that many would perhaps rather avoid. And insurance is often conditional on fulfilling all the risk assessment and monitoring activities mentioned above. An alternative is to choose gritting services that offer automatic liability insurance as part of their contract, as this means even if the worst should happen, your business won’t be exposed financially.

The easy way to fully manage any potential accident risk this winter is by employing professional gritting services such as Ice Watch who provide ongoing monitoring of local weather conditions, grit as and when needed, carry out full risk assessments and keep full and accurate reports. In addition to this, all business contracts are automatically covered by our £10 million liability insurance.

Gritting Services – click here for full information on how we can help.