As an employer, one of your main tasks is to ensure your workplace is safe. Workplace injuries not only cause physical harm to employees but can also mean that your productivity is reduced and perhaps even your reputation is lost. You‘ll potentially have to pay more for your insurance in the future, and it might even be hard to attract new employees if they know your safety record is not a good one.
These and many other reasons mean that it‘s important to keep your workplace as safe as possible and reduce workplace injuries at every opportunity. With that in mind, read on to find out how to do this so that everyone stays safe and your business can grow and move forward.
Do A Safety Assessment
To start with, the best thing you can do as an employer is to carry out a safety assessment of your business. When you do this, you‘ll be able to see where you are doing well and which areas could improve to ensure that everyone who works for you stays as safe as possible.
You‘ll need to look at every area of your business and not just the parts where your employees are working. For example, you might assume you need to check your fleet vehicles and your machinery, but you should also check the corridors, lighting, and outside areas of your workplace. Everything needs to be inspected to make sure it is a safe place for people (and specifically your employees to be). Once you know where the issues are, you can put measures in place to fix them.
The only thing that might still be a problem is injuries caused by third parties. This is why it‘s important to have the details of good third party worker’s compensation lawyers to help your team just in case.
Create Policies And Procedures
If you want to have a safe and productive workplace and reduce the number of workplace injuries (ideally down to zero), you need to have good policies and procedures in place for people to follow. This is why it‘s important to define your safety guidelines and emergency protocols just in case something goes wrong. You should also put training in place so that everyone knows how to work safely.
When you can educate your employees about how to do what you need them to do in a safe way, workplace accidents and injuries will be greatly reduced, so make sure this is a big part of anyone‘s onboarding process.
Keep The Workplace Clean And Organized
If you want to reduce workplace injuries, you‘ll need to make sure the workplace itself is clean and well-organized. The less clutter you have, the less chance there is of anyone hurting themselves or having an accident.
You can actually make your team responsible for keeping the workplace as tidy as possible by implementing a rota where everyone takes their turn in tidying up. In this way, everyone plays their part in ensuring the workplace is a safe one to be in.
It‘s also important to create a culture of open communication so that if there is a problem that could become dangerous and cause injury, workers feel comfortable coming to you for help, knowing you‘ll listen to put things right.
