Working in extreme heat: what the rules require and what prepared companies do differently
Half of Spain is under an orange heat warning again this week. For most people that is a weather headline. For anyone managing prevention for a workforce that spends the day outdoors (or in a kitchen, or in a warehouse with no climate control) it is a more uncomfortable question: do we have this under control, or are we about to improvise again?
Spain changed the rules in 2023. Many prevention plans haven’t caught up
Since Royal Decree-Law 4/2023, whenever an orange or red warning for extreme temperatures is issued, Spanish employers are required to adapt working conditions. Including working hours. If preventive measures cannot guarantee protection, some tasks simply do not happen that day.
This is not a technical recommendation. It is binding regulation, and the Labour Inspectorate has been asking for something very specific ever since: not whether you have a protocol, but whether you can prove it was activated, when, and what was done.
That is where most companies fall short. And even if your operations are outside Spain, the direction of travel is clear: heat is being treated as a workplace risk with specific employer obligations, not as background weather.
Heat is not a “construction sector” risk
That is the usual reflex, and it is wrong. Logistics, street cleaning, hospitality, industrial maintenance: exposure is far more spread out than the headlines suggest. In construction the problem is so structural that we already treat it as a direct consequence of climate change, but limiting it to building sites leaves half your exposed workforce out of the picture.
What should your risk assessment cover? Four things, at a minimum:
- Real exposure per job position: temperature, humidity, direct radiation, physical load. Not the site average: the position.
- Personal factors: age, medication, acclimatisation, particularly sensitive workers.
- Work organisation: schedules, rotation, access to shade and water.
- And activation thresholds: who decides what, based on which official weather warning, and how it gets communicated.
That last point is what sets apart the companies that don’t improvise: the protocol exists before the heatwave, with objective criteria. It is not written during one.
What actually works, without the varnish
Starting shifts earlier to avoid the middle of the day. More frequent breaks in cool areas. Rotating the most physically demanding tasks. Scheduled hydration, without waiting to feel thirsty. None of this is sophisticated. The hard part is making it happen consistently, in July, across twenty work centres at once, without depending on each supervisor’s memory.
That is why heat protocols should live where the rest of your emergency and response plans live: in a system, with owners and records, not in a PDF nobody has opened since May.
One more thing, because it is rarely said: heat stroke is a medical emergency. Confusion, hot dry skin, loss of consciousness. Your line managers need to recognise it in seconds, not look it up in a manual. Health surveillance does the quiet work beforehand: identifying particularly sensitive workers before summer starts.
From compliance to control
If every summer’s inspection campaigns teach anything, it is that the difference is not having measures. It is being able to prove them. Which warning was issued, what was activated, who was informed, what was recorded. That traceability is tedious to maintain by hand, and it is exactly the kind of thing digitalising your OHS management solves well, together with the indicators that tell you whether the protocol is being followed or merely written down.
At Sabentis we see this with our clients every summer: heat protocols are activated from the platform, everything is recorded, and the evidence builds itself. If you want to see how it would work with your own sites and positions on the table, request a demo: half an hour, with your real case.
The heat will be back next year. The question is whether your prevention system will still look the same.
