For managers, employers and health-and-safety advisers.

The heatwave is here and isn’t going anywhere soon: amber warnings, temperatures up to 36°C and a national heat plan in force until around Tuesday 30 June. For you as an employer this is not a matter of waiting it out. You have a duty of care, and during extreme heat that duty is tested in concrete terms — quite literally on the shop floor.

Below is what you need to arrange, plus the practical question it so often comes down to: how do you get the right information to everyone in time, including the people who aren’t sat behind a desk or a mailbox?

Your obligations in brief

Health and safety law requires you to provide a safe and healthy workplace. In the heat that means, concretely: the temperature at the workplace must not damage workers’ health. You must assess the risks of heat in your risk assessment and take suitable measures. During prolonged heat, the health and safety inspectorate expects you to have a heat protocol — and to actually apply it.

In short: having a plan isn’t enough — you have to show that you act on it.

Measures you can take now

Where possible, adjust working hours so that heavy work falls in the cooler morning and not between 12.00 and 15.00. In tropical temperatures, use the rhythm of no more than 45 minutes of heavy work with at least 15 minutes’ break somewhere cool. Provide plenty of cool drinking water, shade or screening, ventilation or cooling indoors, and light work clothing where that is safe. Avoid work in full sun and at height at 30°C or more. Give clear guidance on recognising heat stress, and designate who steps in if someone becomes unwell.

That last point — guidance — is both a legal requirement and crucial in practice. And that is exactly where it often falls down.

The real challenge: reaching everyone in time

A notice on the canteen wall doesn’t reach the driver who sets off at 6am. An email doesn’t reach the engineer who is on site all day. The construction worker, the carer on their bike, the warehouse shift — a large part of your workforce isn’t sat at a computer. And they are precisely the ones most at risk during a heatwave.

So the question isn’t only what you communicate, but whether it lands. A heat instruction that no one reads isn’t a measure — it’s a document.

Reach everyone where they already look: their phone

Almost everyone carries a phone all day. That is why a short, clear safety instruction via WhatsApp works so well: it arrives on the device they already use. No app to install, no log-in codes, no barrier.

With clients who send their toolbox talks this way, we see 95% open within 4 hours and 90% complete within 24 hours — with instant recording of who has seen and confirmed the instruction. That gives you not only the reassurance that the message lands, but also a demonstrable record: audit-ready for health-and-safety certification (such as SCC).

What you can do this week

Put together a short heat instruction with the key points: drink before you’re thirsty, take 15 minutes’ break per 45 minutes, find shade, recognise the signs, look out for each other. Send it to your entire team — including the people out in the field. And record who has read it, so you can demonstrate that you met your duty to inform.

No channel for that right now? We’ll help with that free of charge during this heatwave — see below.

In closing

Your duty of care doesn’t stop with the people you reach easily. It is precisely your mobile workers who need the information most. Make sure your heat instruction lands, is read and is recorded. Then you haven’t just met the law — you’ve genuinely protected your people.

E-lia helps organisations reach their entire workforce with safety instructions via WhatsApp. During this heatwave we’ll inform your people free of charge about the do’s and don’ts in the heat.