8000-260 Maintaining a Healthy and Safe Working Environment

8000-260 Maintaining a Healthy and Safe Working Environment is a unit within the ILM Level 2 module that focuses on improving the working environment for the organisation. Team leaders have a responsibility to ensure that the environment is a conducive environment that supports the well-being of the team members.

This involves being able to promote mental, emotional and physical health for the worker, which are important in ensuring they achieve the desired standards in performance with the assigned roles and responsibilities.The unit is important for leaders as they are tasked with the duty of creating a working environment that does not compromise the wellbeing and health of the team members or employees within the organisation.

The main purpose and aim of the unit is to develop an understanding of the strategies that team leaders and general leaders within the organisation can use to scrutinise the working environment and maintain a healthy and safe work environment for their organisations or teams, which is the main role of organisational leaders and team leaders respectively. The unit is achieved after 8 hours of guided learning and accounts for 1 credit value of the learners overall results in the ILM Level 2 module.

Suitability of the Module

8000-260 Maintaining a Healthy and Safe Working Environment is a significantly applicable course that helps leaders to acquire the necessary information that helps them to build the desired level of safe and healthy environment for the workers. The unit is designed to provide team leaders with information that helps them to create and maintain a supportive and conducive working environment for the members.

The unit is suitable for these team leaders as it guides them in creating a physical environment that is safe and healthy for the environment as well as guides them in appreciating the mental and emotional needs of the team members. The unit is also suitable for the organisational leaders as it helps them to develop an environment built on the principles of health and safety. Organisations have an ethical responsibility and requirement to achieve to create a working environment that is both safe and healthy.

In the legal requirements, the leader has to address issues such as discrimination that may compromise the safety and mental health of the employees and team members. As such, the organisational leaders can significantly benefit from the content of this unit hence making it suitable for them. Organisations tend to recruit external consultants within the organisation.

External consultants need to have mastery of skills such as creating safe and healthy environments hence making the course significantly relevant for them to ensure they can fully support decision-making within the organisation from the basis of information and skills. This unit is, therefore, versatile and suitable for stakeholders within the organisation who are tasked with making decisions or supporting decision-making on factors that affect the performance of the employees.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Show knowledge of the legislations that are associated with the safety, health and welfare of employees or team members within the workplace

• Explain the practices within the organisation that focus on health and safety policies and systems

• Establish good practices that guarantee health and safety of employees and team members

• Prepare reports on accidents and other issues that could compromise the health and safety of employees

• Communicate the standards and requirements of health and safety to their teams

• Identify a hazard and an actual risk in team activities.

• Assess the impacts that risks and hazards could have within the organisation

• Analyse information available from risk and hazard assessments to develop effective interventions to mitigate eth effects

• Communicate the role of team involvement in risk assessment and mitigation.

Key Learning Areas

Health and safety is a wide area of overage in organisational and leadership processes. As such, this unit is significantly wide. Some of the main learning areas within the unit include:

Principles of Health and Safety

The leaders must understand the main principles that are applied when developing an effective working environment in relation to the health and safety of the team members. This includes being able to align the activities and practices within the team to the relevant health and safety standards.

This area in 8000-260 Maintaining a Healthy and Safe Working Environment ensures that the learners are provided with effective guidelines, including the legal frameworks and legislation surrounding employee health as well as environmental sustainability that they should implement in the development of team practices and activities.

The leaders are guided in understanding critical factors such as waste management policies that are outside the work environment that result in unhealthy and unsafe environments. Through acquiring this information, the leaders can develop strategies that are aimed at addressing the issues identified.

Risk Assessment and Management

In this area, leaders are trained in dealing with risk and hazards. They are guided through the differences between risks and hazards hence create an introduction to the factors that could contribute in addressing potential risks before they become hazards. The learners are also made to understand the categories of hazards within the organisation that could lead to accidents. Within this area, the process of reporting forms a principal aspect of learning.

The learners are guided on reporting accidents and near misses to their seniors, which is important in developing interventions from the top levels of the organisation and transmitting them to the teams and individual employees. This reporting is conducted together with the risk and hazard assessments which help identify ways that the risks can be mitigated before they harm the team members.

Learners pursuing 8000-260 Maintaining a Healthy and Safe Working Environment, therefore, are able to build significant information that helps to address the effects of the risks but predict potential risks and implement mitigating strategies and interventions.

Evaluation

Upon completion of the unit, the learners are put through an assessment. They are required to complete a written assessment to test the theory concepts relayed to them throughout the training. Supervised practice is used to determine the practical application of the skills and information acquired through the unit.