Workplace safety is a catch-all that covers many different aspects of the working environment. It can mean you are providing a safe workplace for your employees from health hazards and accidents that can be avoided to ensure they are safe from threats and harm to their persons from others or that their digital information is safe as they are protected when working online in the capacity of their job role.
Regulations included in the Health and Safety at Work Act 19674 stipulate your responsibilities as an employee regarding keeping your workers safe from physical harm. However, these aren't the only threats to a person's safety at work.
If you want to improve workplace safety, these tips can point you in the right direction.
Identify Risks
Before you start to make any changes to how you operate and implement safety adjustments, you need to be aware of the risks to employees and customers or visitors to your workplace. What could pose a threat to a person? How can an accident be caused? What are the chances of something going wrong? By identifying all instances of risk to others and the working environment, you can look at what you can do to reduce or eliminate the risks.
Training
It doesn't matter if you are only a small corner shop; training employees in the best health and safety practices and how they work safety is paramount. Without this training, you cannot expect them to be able to know all of the risks present or identify them, never mind keep themselves and others safe from them too.
Have a training plan that allows you to go over all of the health and safety aspects required to work safely, from how to correctly clean up spills to the right equipment to use to carry out their job role and more.
Then, you need to make sure this training is refreshed periodically to ensure that everyone is aware of what needs to be done or new practices and methods are included as they come up.
PPE
PPE, or personal protection equipment, is part and parcel of keeping employees safe at work. From wearing rubber gloves to wash disease, to face mask to reduce contamination risk, to appropriate coveralls or finding a Breathing Apparatus Supplier, you need to make sure that not only do you have all the applicable PPE for your business as per industry standards, but that it's in good working order, fit for purpose and that everyone is using them as required. This means ensuring employees don't enter the workplace without their equipment, i.e. goggles, ear muffs and hard hats for construction sites along with hi-vis jackets and that the same applies to visitors too.
Security
Another consideration for safety in the workplace is protecting your employees from physical threats from outside the business. This is the act of making sure no one can access your workplace that shouldn't be there and that everyone is safe when carrying out their duties outdde of the workplace too.
Having locks on doors only accessible via key fobs, identify cards, biometrics, etc. is an excellent line of defence, as is having a security guard at the door requesting people sign in to gain access and those without prior permissions or appointments refused entry.
Depending on the industry you are in, you should be monitoring your workplace for all signs of unusual activity; in a shop, this could be the same people frequenting at different times but not buying anything or someone lingering around staff-only access areas, but this could look totally different for office workers, or a medical facility for example.
Cleanliness and Repairs
A messy and dirty workplace will most definitely threaten an employee's health physically and mentally. If there isn't a safe way to perform their duties or no one keeps on top of cleaning, chances are someone will become ill or hurt quickly.
Contamination from dirty working environments, airborne illnesses and infections can quickly spread if a strict cleaning schedule isn't kept in place, even if you just work in an office. Ensuring you are keeping on top of cleaning all areas is vital to giving your employees a safe and healthy workplace.
However, ignoring cleanliness can bring pests like rodents, making the workspace unsafe. In such situations, it's crucial to get help from Commercial Rodent Control experts. They have the skills and tools to remove pests and keep the area clean. That’s why it’s essential to ensure you are keeping on top of cleaning all areas. It is vital to giving your employees a safe and healthy workplace.
The same goes for expecting them to work with equipment or supplies that aren’t really fit for purpose. The risk of harm to a person or to others increases drastically when you don't equip them with the tools to carry out their work. So make sure you are getting all repairs done in a timely fashion and that if you need to replace or update equipment vital to performing tasks, you do so.
Health and safety in the workplace can be as simple as ensuring everything is clean or as complex as running regular risk assessments and implementing ongoing training depending on your business needs and regulations. Staying on top of all of these aspects is vital to allow you to keep everyone safe.
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