(Akiit.com) In any business, one of your main concerns is always going to be ensuring that your people are as safe as possible. The truth is that this can actually be particularly hard to get right, and it is something which you might find yourself worrying about quite a lot. If you are keen to make sure that you are doing whatever you can to keep the safe, however then there are a number of things to consider in order to make it happen. In this article, we are going to take a look at the basics of keeping your people safe at work, along with some ideas which you might never have considered. Follow these, and you will find that you are able to keep your employees much safer no matter what might be happening within the workplace.
Risk Assessments
First of all, you need to make sure that you carry out risk assessments at regular intervals. The law dictates that you do this before anyone sets foot into a new workplace, and every six months thereafter at least. Risk assessing is both simple and quite hard to get right all at the same time. You need to make sure that you think about everything that could possibly go wrong in our workplace, and that can be quite a lot of things once you start thinking about it.
Because it is so hard to get this right, you might want to think about getting the professionals in in order to make sure that you are not missing anything. In some industries, it is even a legal obligation to have someone professional do it with you, so it’s worth doing regardless. As long as you properly risk assess your workplace, you will find that you are doing plenty towards keeping our people safe in the workplace, so it is definitely something to put as much effort into as you possibly can.
Industry-Specific Safety
You might also have a number of things which you need to think about here simply by virtue of being in a particular industry. First of all, you should look into what the law says about the industry that you work in, as you might be surprised to discover some of the rules you have to adhere to which you were not even aware of. You should also make sure that you are following anything which is common sense for your industry. If you happen to work with radioactive materials, for instance, you will need to give all of your employees chemical protective suits. If you work in construction, then wearing hard hats and high-vis vests is essential. You need to think of your own industry specifically, so that you can be absolutely certain of actually keeping your employees as safe as humanly possible when they are at work. If you don’t, you will probably only be doing far below the bare minimum.
Common Sense
Safety is one of those things where allowing common sense to prevail will generally do you pretty well. As long as you are happy to allow your employees to use their common sense, most of the accidents and injuries that occur in workplaces will not happen for your workforce. Of course, common sense is not a replacement for proper security control, but it is something which can itself save a lot of hassle and a lot of trouble. By employing common sense, you will avoid so many injuries, so it’s definitely worth ensuring that you have the kind of workplace culture which actually allows people to use their initiative in this way. You should also make use, as a big part of this, that people feel able to tell you if there is anything they have seen which might be wrong or unsafe. That alone is going to make a huge difference to how safe your employees are in the workplace, so it’s definitely worth thinking about.
Reporting
You need to make sure that you and all of your colleagues are properly reporting anything that might go wrong, as this is actually an important part of stopping it from happening again in the future. Reporting means that you report not just actual injuries and accidents, but also near-misses which might have led to such problems. That way, you have a legal log of such events, along with an indicator of any problem areas you might need to work on. This is vital both legally and morally, so make sure you don’t overlook it.
Staff Writer; Jerry Wade