The PKSafety Blog

Read the latest news!

Worker Uptake Mistakes

11 May 2022
styles of leadership

Here at PK, we believe that the most important part of purchasing good value PPE, workwear or clothing is whether your operatives will use/wear the products you procure. 

This is something we call “Workforce Take-Up". 

Unfortunately, there are lots of ways that companies and departments can get workforce take-up wrong. 

Here is the 3 most common and how you can avoid them: 

  1. NOT TRIALLING PRODUCTS – All too often specification decisions are made on the basis of cost and technical or functional performance. This doesn't consider the human element of comfort and wearer attitudes/preferences. These have a greater impact on the likelihood that the products will be used. It really helps to get workforce buy-in to a product or selection of products before rolling it out.

  2. NOT RECORDING TRIALS – When organisations do run trials a common problem is that specific quantitative feedback isn't recorded by users. This lack of presentable data means that making a decision after the trial becomes much harder and reliant on an “educated guess” based on emotion not fact. This can lead to making the wrong call.

  3. TRIALLING TOO MANY PRODUCTS – When you trial more than 3 products making a distinction between one or the other becomes much harder. This can confuse the feedback you’re getting from the operatives and then complicate the final decision.

How can you avoid these pitfalls? The obvious step is to start running trials on any new products.  These need to be a minimum of a week and a maximum of a month.  Shorter or longer will confuse the feedback you receive.  Secondly you need to get specific feedback from your operatives; ideally this needs to be fact based (or quantitative) like ratings.  The best way to get this is to use something like our downloadable feedback form.  Lastly, only run trials on a pre-selected range of products, ideally this would be a maximum or between 3 and 5. 

We hope this helps.  If you want to have a chat or if there’s anything we can help with then give us a shout on 01443 741999 or email us at sales@pksafetyuk.com.