How To Keep Your Employees Safe In The Workplace
No matter the shape or size of your business, protecting the health and safety of your team should always be a top priority. After all, those within it are the heart, soul, and backbone of your company. If you can’t protect your workers, then there will be significant consequences to be faced. Even a single workplace incident can have a huge impact on your business as a whole, resulting in lost money, time, and productivity, as well as damage to your reputation. With that in mind, here are seven things that you can do to keep your employees safe in the workplace.
Hire The Very Best
Protecting your team begins the moment you decide to hire your first employee. Rather than employing the first person that you can find, you should spend time searching for the very best talent. Hardworking and competent workers are much more likely to follow your rules, including those regarding safety. This means that they’ll put themselves and others at less risk. To attract those sorts of people, you must write a great job ad and offer a competitive salary and benefits.
Look For Potential Risks
No business or workplace is entirely free from risk, but some have more dangers than others. To keep your team safe and abide by the law, you must carry out risk assessments regularly. Once you know what it is that could harm your staff, you should take the precautions necessary to minimize the threat. Where fire safety is concerned, for example, you could add fire detectors, alarms, and doors. You should also put up signs to show people where hazards are present.
Educate The Whole Team
Common sense is crucial in safety, but so is knowledge. Rather than expect your employees to keep themselves safe, you should explain to them exactly how to do that. You can do this by providing training on your safety measures and the importance of following them. This training could be given by you or by a safety expert and should be repeated regularly. You must also ensure that you provide any safety equipment or tools that your team might need.
Display Important Safety Information
Your team isn’t going to remember all of the information that you give them, no matter how many times you repeat their safety training. Because of this, you should remind them of the most important pieces of information by displaying them on signs. Certain types of signs, like those directing towards fire exits and first-aid boxes, are required by law, but you may choose to add a few others too. These will include notices of hazards that you can’t eliminate or minimize.
Keep A Tidy Office
A messy workplace can cause absolute chaos for a business. As well as resulting in stress and loss of productivity, clutter can also cause accidents and make emergency situations, like fires, much more dangerous. For this reason, you must ensure that your office space is kept as tidy as possible. This will be made much easier if you declutter. You should also ask that your team clean up after themselves, and consider hiring a cleaning service if the untidiness continues.
Speak To The Experts
As much research as you’ve likely done into workplace safety, you are not an expert. There will be gaps in your knowledge, and it’s these gaps that could put your business and employees at risk. With that in mind, you should speak to those with much more experience than you have, like safety professionals, lawyers, and even police officers and firefighters. These experts can suggest safety measures that might not have crossed your mind, preventing a potential disaster.
Learn From Your Mistakes
Even after doing everything that you can think of to keep your team safe, there is still a chance that someone will get sick or injured in your business. When this happens, it’s vital that you learn from the experience. Make a log of the incident in your records and consider what you can change to prevent the same problem from occurring again. The solution might be as simple as putting up a few more signs or updating your safety training, but it can save you a lot of trouble.
Accidents happen all the time, and although some of them are unavoidable, many can be prevented. As a business owner and employer, it is your responsibility to keep your team safe from such incidents. Hopefully, with the advice above, you’ll find it much easier to do just that.