7 Ways To Ensure Workplace Safety
Workplace safety is vital and it doesn’t matter if your workplace is a building site, an office, a shop, or you have employees on the road. Everywhere you work MUST be safe.
Here are 7 ways to look after yourself and your employees by ensuring you support workplace safety.
Looking after your employees
It’s vital for a company to realise that employees are their greatest asset. Keeping them safe can take you a long way when to comes to productivity and reputation.
Making sure that health and safety rules are followed on a day to day basis can keep everyone out of harm, and your business on schedule, avoiding the extra costs of compensation and such.
When you’re not working amongst your employees, it may be easy to dismiss them as people not important to you, but this is not the case! In most structures of a workplace, the employee is the most important part.
Proper performance
Making sure employees are doing things properly with regards workplace safety can be more important than you think. When it comes to manual labour, for example, there are many ways to injure yourself by lifting too much, or putting the strain on the wrong parts of your body when you work.
The kind of injury you can get from not working properly can be both minor or serious, so making sure you know how to shift heavy weights properly is nothing to take lightly.
Training exercises are worth putting into action if it means preventing common injuries within your workforce, even if it’s just to provide basic advice rather than actually fully training people.
Employee health
Making sure the people you employ are healthy is great practice. This can often help you tell if you can rely on them, and if they’ll be able to do their job to the right standard.
Often companies will be put off of hiring those who suffer from heart conditions, or prone to fainting, as these conditions can be a huge risk in a physical working environment; possibly even putting others in danger too.
If your employees are struggling to keep up with all of the labour, try to make sure they get the rest or help they need to keep going and restore them to their best condition.
Many employers now also pay for their staff to join a gym. The increased productivity and fewer sick days more than pays for the gym fees.
Keep a tidy workplace
Keeping your workplace tidy can really help to keep people focused on workplace safety. If staff are working around mess – computer leads strewn across the floor, for example, or no rules around tidying up the staff room – can lead to frustration and cutting corners.
So make sure you keep your eye on mess and trip hazards! At first, a simple trip or fall might not sound like a serious issue, but if you add an active power tool to the mix, it’s likely the outcome can change quite a bit.
Employ proper health and safety
In all workplaces, a certain standard of health and safety is a requirement, which is something which must be learned by both employers and employees.
While it is mostly up to the employers and management to make sure that the workplace safety is up to code, there are a lot of regulations that employees have to follow too.
Check WHS Documents for more info on the type of regulations that you should expect to follow in the workplace.
Making sure to follow these requirements can save you on the legal side when there’s an accident, as the person not following the requirements will likely be held responsible.
Equip everyone
On building sites, it’s typical that you would see everyone wearing the standard safety gear, like helmets and safety glasses.
There are many workplace injuries every year that happen to people who weren’t wearing the sufficient protection while they worked. In some cases, the damages might not even be obvious until it’s too late.
An example would be ear protection, as it’s important to make sure your hearing is protected while you work with loud machinery.
The damage to your hearing might not be noticeable at first, but it can come to be a long-term effect.
Protection on your eyes is seen as one of the most important, as when you’re doing physical work, the amount of dust and small fragments that might be flying freely can really damage your eyesight, and put you out of work.
Check up on your machinery
A lot of workplace accidents can come down to faulty machinery, so it’s important that the reliability of each piece of equipment is checked.
If a company has tried to skip costs and invested in cheaper and lower quality tools, they may be risking the security of their workforce.
Imagine an employee is working with a power tool and the blade snaps or shatters, or just malfunctions in general; fragments of sharp metal flying out could cause serious injuries. So make sure your equipment and safety gear is up to standard, or higher, to ensure workplace safety.
Prepare for bad weather
Working outside is when the weather can affect everyone the most, especially when working on high up surfaces.
You don’t want to be working on something slippery, and making sure the workplace is safe from the outside weather can really help secure the safety of the area people need to work in.
Leaving electrical equipment out in the rain is another big risk that should be taken under no circumstances. Not only can you risk electrocution, but hazards like this can also cause a fire. Don’t let weather adversely affect workplace safety and ensure that it doesn’t compromise the safety of employees.
There are many ways to keep safety standards up in the workplace, above aren’t the only ones, but they are simple tips you can use towards ensuring the best for your workforce when it comes to their wellbeing.
While it may seem like a completely profitless and selfless deed to put everyone’s well being first, it really works out best for business to ensure that your most important asset can remain with a high morale and good health.
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