Fiona Barrington-Wood and her bar manager Ian Swan at The Tower Hotel in Crieff have been working tirelessly to create a safe workplace for their staff.

Protecting visitors
For Fiona the safety of her staff is the highest priority. Thankfully customers who become violent or verbally aggressive to staff are in the minority but Fiona has decided to take an approach that puts staff safety at the centre of everything they do.

Fiona knows that even one attack on her staff is unacceptable and working with Healthy Working Lives has ensured that everything possible has been done to make sure they are protected and as safe as possible.

Fiona explains, “We’ve also made good relationships with local law enforcement officers who are on hand to give a quick response anytime we need them and take part in the local Pubwatch scheme where we can share information on range of issues including aggression towards any pub staff in the area. This means we can put steps in place to prepare to deal with situations before they happen.

“We always prefer to try to stop situations happening where we can. We’ve designed our pub to attract the type of customers we know will behave politely to members of staff and won’t be aggressive or drink too much.”

Fully trained staff
Fiona and Ian worked with Jane Duffy, an advisor from Healthy Working Lives on creating a risk assessment. Ian says, “It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Jane helped us identify situations where our staff are at most risk and come up with ways to make sure they know what to do. This included talking to the staff about their safety and letting them know we wanted to protect them from aggression in the workplace.

“All employees are now empowered to handle situations without hesitation. They have a clear set of instructions to follow that helps them identify aggression as it develops and deal with it confidently.

“By ensuring staff know what to do if any trouble starts, they know exactly what is expected of them and their stress levels are reduced as well as making everyone happier and safer.”

Additional measures
Ian explains, “We’ve installed CCTV and found this to be a good deterrent, there are no blind spots and we’ve even helped solve a local crime with our CCTV outside the building. We can always hand the police a copy of CCTV recording if they need it.

“Some of our control measures are things like asking people to remove hats that could conceal identity and banning football colours.

“We avoid having staff working alone, having two people on at the same time means there is always someone there for support if anything happens.”