Health and Safety for Beginners Forums

Hi All you helpful lot...

As the title says really - I'm wording our companies policy and they have changed the "tone" of their other policies etc and requested the same from the H&S Policy - does it really matter which I use or should it be "employee" to keep it in line with the HSWA '74??

Hi ct.

Contracts of employment state "the employee and the employer."

HSWA, as you so rightly say, says employer and employee.

Says it all in my logic and yours too by the sounds of things.

Thanks Alexis - nice to see a friendly face

Yeah my logic does appear to be on the same page as yours - our HR dept can be quite precious about "tone" policies and so on.

ctjcrm wrote: ↑Wed May 16, 2018 12:43 pm Thanks Alexis - nice to see a friendly face

Yeah my logic does appear to be on the same page as yours - our HR dept can be quite precious about "tone" policies and so on.

I think all HR departments can be a bit precious at times.

There may be times when you need to differentiate between your employees and those visiting your sites either as visitors or contractors. All could be phrased as a colleague in various ways. For official or important documents like policies, I'd go go with employee, visitor and contractor which covers most entities.
For example
visitors/contractors may / must be accompanied by a company employee - nice and simple and clearly defined who has what role
of
colleagues/ colleagues may /must be accompanied by colleagues - no idea who is who or what they do

You could write a document using employee etc and then simply use find/replace to use the word colleague and see how it alters the document. If they really are interchangeable then no further changes would be necessary. Otherwise the use of colleague will create larger documents and larger documents usually create more confusion.

Change it. It won't matter.

I used to work for one of the biggest companies in the UK with over 100 sites. They were SJW snowflakes as well and called their employees colleagues and it appeared in everything from employment contracts to health and safety policies, and if you didn't call them colleagues you got in to trouble.

God I hate 'colleague' and 'associates' and all that HR touchy-feely puffery! Employer and employee defines it perfectly. Harrumph.

About the only companies I can think of where 'Colleague' is justified is the John Lewis Group where they all have a stake in the company.

The rest is all about snowflakes....

Belt and braces:

"For the purposes of this policy, the definition of 'colleague' is an employee of Company."

Given the master/ servant relationship, I'd use employer/ employee with reference to visitors and contractors.