IFEDA : Fire & Safety Signage Workshop - Bury

Are you selling signs? if not or feel you would like more information to do it better then:

There will be a Safety Signs Workshop in Bury on Thursday 30th October at 09:30

This half-day workshop covers topics such as:-

1. Safety Signs i.e. Classification, Performance Requirements, Design principles, Geometric Shapes, Safety & Contrast Colours for Safety Signs - BS ISO 3864-1:2011. Sizes and Viewing Distances BS ISO 3864-1:2011 and BS 5499-4:2013. Photo-luminescent Safety Signs What are they and how do they work? Categorisation of Safety Signs According to BS EN ISO 7010.
Normative and Legal Framework
2. Principles of a SWGS with reference to BS ISO 16069:2004. Location Levels, Sign Types and their Application, Markings and Strips & Escape Plans – Alarm Zone Plans
3. Selection and Positioning of Signs For:- Exit & Fire Doors, Fire Fighting Equipment, Warning/Hazards and Stairwells.
4. Site Surveys:- Tips on carrying out a site survey
5. Test:- open book exam and then discussion of the answers in case clarification is required.

Recent course feedback includes:- “a very enjoyable course, we learned a lot and I have already implemented a couple of instant changes. The course will certainly help with my FRA's as to what is a requirement and what can be recommended. The half a day was about right”. “An extremely informative and well delivered course with outstanding and comprehensive hand-outs for future reference.”

Cost to members is £45 per person + vat whilst the cost to non-members is £70 per person + vat

To book please email us at info@ifeda.org 

CPD for IFEDA's Signage Course

Great news: IFEDA's safety signage workshop has just been awarded CPD status - many thanks to the Everlux team for all their input. More courses to be announced soon. CPD for signs means that all of IFEDA's workshops and courses have CPD accreditation. Course information can be found onwww.ifeda.org/training

Fire doesn't just destroy cities – it is the reason they look the way they do

A really good article on fire - courtesy of the Guardian newspaper. Please click here

IFEDA Conference & Safety Management UK

Safety Management UK will be at the IFEDA national conference on 4th October, will you?

They have developed a tablet and web-based fire risk assessment tool which can be used by extinguisher and alarm engineers as well as those with general fire safety knowledge. The software is an easy to use portable software solution which provides the user with hints and tips to each question, helping them complete the assessments. The system can provide management reports and allows the user to manage the significant findings and residual works from the fire risk assessments as well as allowing management monitoring of reports for properties around the country.

All welcome to this free event.

IFEDA quoted on line

Good to see IFEDA's efforts to raise quality standards are paying off - but it is a long slow road. Please click here 

IFEDA National Conference

Further to the flyer below I am delighted to announce that the latest speaker to sign up for the National Conference on 4th October in Telford is Wilf Butcher. Wilf is the

Chief Executive Officer for the Association for Specialist Fire Protection and will be giving a talk on elements of passive fire protection e.g. fire doors, retro fitting of passive fire products etc.

Being a not for profit organization IFEDA's afternoon talks are free to both members and non members alike. However there is a nominal charge of £20 should a non-member wish to join us for the buffet lunch at 12:30 -  a great net-working opportunity and a chance to see the products and information from our associated members and (where applicable) speakers.

Please contact the IFEDA national Office for details.

The IFEDA National Conference

Following the morning's agm there will be afternoon talks/workshops which are open to non IFEDA members: There is no charge to attend the talks. However, should you wish to join us for a buffet lunch, and take advantage of a great networking opportunity, there will be  a small charge of £20 + vat for non members. 

Non members should contact the National Office to make a booking*

*credit card payments accepted.

Marathon Success

Congratulations to Steve Baxter, IFEDA's National Vice Chairman, who as part of the Shelton Striders recently completed a European Marathon of 26 miles in 9 countries and within just 24 hours on behalf of the Motor Neurone Disease charity. Any donations towards this very worthy cause can be made on line via  www.justgiving.com/2014in2014

Fire Safety Signs Workshop from IFEDA

Fire Safety Signs (half day course) 
Date 22nd July Venue Southampton Cost to member £45 Cost to non-member £90
To book please send us an email the full diary of all of IFEDA's courses can be found at www.ifeda.org/training

Performance Appraisals Don't Improve Performance

For those of you with staff and still tied to the wheel of annual performance reviews here is a thought provoking article from Ray Williams

Web: http://raywilliams.ca 

The traditional performance appraisal as practiced in the majority of organizations today is fundamentally flawed and in-congruent with our values-based, vision-driven and collaborative work environments. There is compelling new research that shows performance reviews actually don’t improve performance, and may actually cause a decline in performance. Also, performance reviews are tied to the Bell or Normal Curve, which is now being seriously questioned.

Performance reviews have been around for ages, apparently as far back as third-century China, but were popularized during the Industrial Revolution. Certainly by the l980’s performance appraisals in the form of GE’s CEO Jack Welsh’s “rank-and-yank” system were widely used in organizations.

New research by psychologists at Kansas State University, Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University examined how people respond to negative feedback they receive in performance reviews. Conventional wisdom is people who are really motivated to improve their performance would respond well to getting critical feedback in a performance review. The research demonstrated this wisdom is wrong. Those employees who have a desire to learn and grow—presumably the best employees—were significantly bothered by the negative feedback they received. One of the authors of the study argues that if negative feedback has the potential to discourage even the best performers, then managers need to be aware that what was meant as praise doesn’t get misconstrued as criticism.

These conclusions are echoed by Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton comments that doing performance evaluations well is like doing “blood-letting well—it is a bad practice that does more harm than good in all or nearly all cases.” Sutton argues in his book, with co-author, psychologist Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense, “performance rankings can lead to destructive internal competition , which can make it tough to build a culture of knowledge sharing….In addition, there seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy at work, in which a person who receives a poor evaluation does even worse in the subsequent rating period.”

In an article published in The Psychological Bulletin, psychologists A. Kluger and A. Denisi report completion of a meta-analysis of 607 studies of performance evaluations and concluded that at least 30% of the performance reviews ended up in decreased employee performance. Many specialists in the field have written about ineffective performance reviews. Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins, in Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What To Do Instead, cite studies that clearly show performance appraisals do not work and suggest a replacement; and Aubrey Daniels, author of Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money, argues that performance appraisals are actually counter-productive. Daniels cites a study by the Society for Human Resource Management that found 90% of performance appraisals are painful and don’t work; and they produce an extremely low percentage of top performers.

Brain research shows that when a person’s status is threatened—which often happens in performance reviews that contain “constructive feedback”—activity diminishes in certain regions of the brain. David Rock, author of Your Brain At Work, and director of the Neuroleadership Institute, says that when that occurs, “people’s fields of view actually constrict, they can take in a narrow stream of data, and there’s a restriction in creativity.

Performance reviews are tied to our belief in the Bell Curve, or “normal curve” a system first developed by Abraham de Moivre in 1733. Its use moved from the observation of planets to the use in population statistics in the 19th century and finally used in an evaluation of the performance and intelligence of individuals.

Josh Bersin in his article in Forbes on the myth of the Bell Curve says the curve “does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness." Bersin cites how Microsoft has decided to disband its performance management process, --“after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave.” Bersin cites the research by Ernest O’Boyle Jr. and Herman Aguinis who found that 94% of researchers, entertainers, politicians and athletes did not follow a normal distribution but rather a “Power Law” or “long tail” distribution, in which there are a small number of “hyper high performers,” a large number of “good performers,” and a smaller number of “low performers.”

So what is the alternative to performance appraisal systems? If you want to develop the good performers and hyper high performers, companies need to focus very heavily on “collaboration, professional development,coaching and empowering people to do great things,” says Bersin.

Clearly, the annual performance review was designed for a work environment where control of individual employee performance was a key function. In today’s collaborative environment, that perspective no longer makes sense. Some key questions that need to be answered are: Why are we perpetuating a system that research (including recent brain research) shows is not only ineffective, but counterproductive; and what are better processes to replace the performance review?

Fire Safety Signs Workshop from IFEDA

Fire Safety Signs (half day course) 
Date 29th May Venue Bury Cost to member £45 Cost to non-member £90
To book please send us an email the full diary of all of IFEDA's courses can be found at www.ifeda.org/training

Course updates and credit cards

Credit/Debit Cards: Please note that IFEDA is now able to take payment for training courses, memberships and goods i.e. British Standards, log books etc by credit/debit cards: N.B. WE WILL NEVER ASK FOR YOUR PIN NUMBER.

Fire extinguisher full (3 day course)

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
6 – 8 May	Chester	£540 + vat	£640+ vat
1 – 3 July	Buckingham	“	“

Fire Alarm – Introduction to Design

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
28 April	Middlesbrough	£150 + vat	£210 + vat
15 May	Southampton	“	“
19 May	Chester	“	“

Fire Alarm – Maintenance

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
29 April	Middlesbrough	£150 + vat	£210 + vat
16 May	Southampton	“	“
20 May	Chester	“	“

Fire Extinguisher Refresher (one day)

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
1 May	Carlisle	£155 + vat	£185 + vat

Fire Hose Reel Course

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
25 June	Southampton New venue	£235 + vat	£285 + vat

Dry riser - Maintenance

Date	Venue	Cost to member	Cost to non-member
24 June	Southampton New venue	£235 + vat	£285 + vat

The full training diary can  be found at www.ifeda.org/training to book any courses please send Emma an email via info@ifeda.org

IFEDA Extinguisher Refresher Courses Carlisle and Buckingham

BS5306-3: 2009 annex A states that fire extinguisher certificates must be renewed every three years. To that end we have the following extra courses:-

The fire extinguisher refresher course for sales personnel (Buckingham 3rd April) will also be run as a full refresher course with appropriate certificates issued.

Please note the extra refresher in Carlisle on 1st May please click here for info

IFEDA courses, updates

Lots of updates IFEDA courses including 'extinguishers for sales personnel'.  For more details please see the training page of our website 
To book any courses please send an email to info@ifeda.org

New training courses brochure

Our new training courses brochure can be found via the following link

Please note that the dry riser course for 18th march is now full, however there is an extra course on 15th April in Chester.

There is also and extra extinguisher refresher course on 24th Feb in Buckingham, at the IFEDA national office.

Council gives go-ahead for sprinklers in wake of Lakanal tragedy

Southwark Council is installing sprinklers to its sheltered housing schemes and temporary accommodation hostels as part of £32 million plans to improve fire safety in the wake of the Lakanal House tragedy.

A coroner’s report following the fire at the 14-storey tower block in July 2009, in which six residents died, recommended that the council considered retrofitting sprinklers to high-rise residential buildings.

Following a feasibility study, Southwark’s cabinet has decided against installing sprinklers in general needs blocks, but has given the go-ahead to install sprinklers to existing and future sheltered housing schemes and temporary accommodation hostels.

It plans to retrofit existing properties by September 2016 at an estimated cost of £4.9 million.

The combined annual repair and maintenance bill will be £25,100.

Council officers advised against installing personal protection sprinkler systems for vulnerable residents in general needs blocks unable to self-evacuate, citing the effects of a triggered sprinkler system on medical needs, life support and medical equipment.

Southwark will spend a further £3.6 million by March 2015 installing automatic battery-powered smoke/heat detection to general needs-tenanted council homes in the 142 blocks included in the study.

The same equipment will be installed to all tenanted council homes over the next 10 to 15 years at an estimated cost of £23.4 million - or £703 per property.

IFEDA : Fire Hose reel Course

IFEDA Fire Hose Reel Course (to BSEN 671-3: 2009)

DATE	COURSE	VENUE	COST TO MEMBER	NON-MEMBER
21st February 2014	Fire Hose Reel	Chester	£235 + vat	£285 + vat

Housing Minister Carl Sargeant backs controversial sprinkler regulations in homes after Quebec care home tragedy

The introduction of sprinkler systems in all new homes will “set Wales apart” from the rest of the world in how it promotes fire safety, the Housing Minister has said.

Carl Sargeant gave his backing to the systems which are being phased in for some buildings from April this year before becoming mandatory for all new and converted houses and flats.

Mr Sargeant made the comments at a seminar of the British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association – emphasising the importance of the policy in light of a devastating fire in a Quebec care home which may have killed up to 30 residents.

His intervention follows repeated criticism over the costs of installation of the systems for the housebuilding industry by notable UK Government figures, including Communities Secretary Ed Pickles and Welsh Secretary David Jones.

Mr Pickles criticised the burden of regulations in the Welsh housing sector, writing to Labour AM Ann Jones – who proposed the regulations – that: “The growing distance in relative building costs between England and Wales will place Wales at a competitive disadvantage, diverting housing investment away from Wales.

“Whatever the intentions, I fear this burden of red tape will mean less housebuilding, fewer first-time buyers and more expensive rents and mortgages in Wales.”

Sprinkler regulations will apply to new and converted care homes from April, as well as children’s residential homes, hospices, halls of residence, boarding houses and some hostels.

It will then apply to all new and converted houses and flats from January 1, 2016.

Mr Sargeant told delegates: “Domestic fires continue to have a devastating effect on individuals, families and communities across the world.

“We have just seen the tragic loss of life to residents in a care home in Quebec, as a result of fire. It’s imperative that we do everything we can to make our homes, care homes and residential buildings as safe as possible.

“I am very proud that Wales is the first country in the world to require the installation of an automatic fire suppression system in all new houses and flats. Our policy on fire sprinklers is part of our continuing wider approach to promoting fire safety and we will continue to set Wales apart as leading the way in this regard.

“These pilot projects form part of the phased introduction of the fire sprinklers in all new homes. This phased approach allows the building industry to gain experience and skills, and gives the sector the opportunity to innovate and reduce the costs of installing sprinklers.”

IFEDA has many members in wales. Anyone looking for guidance on the installation of fire equipment or assistance with your Fire Risk Assessment should go to http://www.ifeda.org/new-member-list/?region=6 

IFEDA Courses January 2014 and onwards

We have the following non alarm courses (please see separate post for  fire alarms) please note the change of venues from Stockport and Fareham to Chester and |Southampton respectively.

IFEDA Fire Extinguisher Refresher * (to BS5306-3: 2009 & 8: 2012)

DATE	COURSE	VENUE	COST TO MEMBER	NON-MEMBER
Mon 10th Feb 2014	Extinguisher refresher	Chester	£155 + vat	£185 + vat
Monday 24th Feb	“	Buckingham (IFEDA office)	£155 + vat	£185 + vat
Mon 10th March 2014	“	Southampton	£155 + vat	£185 + vat
Mon 7th April 2014	“	Chester	£155 + vat	£185 + vat

 * Depending on numbers (usually a minimum of 5) extinguisher refresher courses can be run at your premises.

IFEDA Fire Extinguisher Full Course (to BS5306 parts 3 & 8)

DATE	COURSE	VENUE	COST TO MEMBER	NON-MEMBER
11th – 13 February 2014	Extinguisher full course	Chester	£540 + vat	£640 + vat
11th – 13th March 2014	“	Southampton	£540 + vat	£640 + vat
08th  – 10th April 2014	“	Chester	£540 + vat	£640 + vat

IFEDA Fire Hose Reel Course (to BSEN 671-3: 2009)

DATE	COURSE	VENUE	COST TO MEMBER	NON-MEMBER
21st February 2014	Fire Hose Reel	Chester	£235 + vat	£285 + vat

IFEDA Dry Riser Maintenance Course (to BS9990: 2006)

Please note this is now a ONE day course

DATE	COURSE	VENUE	COST TO MEMBER	NON-MEMBER
18th March 2014	Dry Riser Maintenance	Chester	£235 + vat	£285 + vat

Course info, plus the full diary for 2014, can be found at www.ifeda.org/training

To book please send Emma an email on info@ifeda.org