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Keen to raise his workers health and safety risk awareness and provide them with the tools to manage and reduce risk on a daily basis, manager Wayne Terry engaged Impactt to deliver training to his workers at Readymix Gulf as a part of the company’s Safety Month.

As site manager of the Sharjah and Ajman sites, lesser known Emirates of the UAE, Mr Terry has seen firsthand that his workers, who originate from southern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, have little consciousness of the potential health and safety risks they encounter in their work each day and are thus frequently putting themselves at risk of injury.

Workers at Readymix Gulf largely work either as drivers (of trucks delivering the cement) or in the workshop (fixing the trucks). The nature of these jobs is such that workers are engaged in a multitude of different processes both on and off site on a daily basis.

An effective health and safety management system is clearly important in this situation as it enables for the promotion of a safe working environment and the facility monitoring it. However, in addition to this, a level of personal awareness and responsibility is critical for identifying and reducing risk in what is a complex and frequently changing environment.

To meet this need, in consultation with management and supervisors, Impactt developed a bespoke training programme which was delivered in Hindi and covered:

• Why care about health and safety?
• What are the health and safety H&S risks on concrete processing plants?
• Basic health and safety on site
• Build Safe UAE and how workers can contribute
• The view from workers
• Chemicals on site and how to use them safely
• Safety for drivers

Visits to site prior to the training session were important for collecting information on, and photos of, how workers were working so that the group exercises and presentations presented situations that the workers themselves had experienced. Each of the sessions involved exercises where workers worked in group to assess a situation, identify the issues, and discuss strategies for addressing them.

Using these kinds of participatory methods for training is very effective, particularly when dealing with semi-literate audiences. Plus they mark a good change from presentation heavy sessions and can be quite enjoyable – the workers had a great deal of fun working in teams to act out the animated safety stories developed by Build Safe UAE!

Finally throughout the sessions, and particularly in ‘The View from Workers’, we worked hard to facilitate workers to talk about their own view of health and safety and what needed to happen to manage the risks on site. In our experience workers have frequently thought before about their health on site and have some of the best suggestions for tackling safety issues.

Workers reported that they will “think about a safe exit before start of work in case of an emergency” and “review an area for risks before starting work and take steps to reduce them”, which indicates an encouraging level of risk awareness. Mr Terry reported following the training that “all the workers were very happy and satisfied with the course which has had a positive impact on site”.

If you are interested in finding out more about Impactt’s training services in the UAE and other Gulf countries please contact jaana@impacttlimited.com.