Terri Ramsey Beavers Building a successful business without ensuring a high level of workplace safety is near impossible. First, the higher level of safety on premises keeps at bay expensive and potentially fatal accidents that can easily close the company’s doors forever. Second, maintaining a well-motivated and engaged workforce will prove to be very hard if your employees don’t feel the company they work for puts enough effort into ensuring their safety.
What’s important to note is that meeting these goals doesn’t require extensive work or resources. As a matter of fact, workplace safety can be drastically improved in no more than a couple of very simple steps.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important examples.
Perform regular safety audits
This type of inspection will give you a great insight into some of the company’s potential weak points and shed a light on the procedures that could be refined in order to achieve greater efficiency and a higher level of safety. Here’s the short list of the business components you should subject to inspection:
- The current state of the business equipment and facilities
- The maintenance schedule, record-keeping, and procedures
- Workplace, equipment-handling, and waste disposal procedures
- The workers’ training level
- Safety equipment like fire extinguishers
- Electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems
- Emergency first-response procedures
Provide precise and unequivocal guidelines
Every single action your employees need to perform at the worksite needs to be explained in a very clear and unequivocal manner that will leave no room for hesitation or free interpretation. Furthermore, all these guidelines, recommendations, and procedures should be made publically available and clearly displayed at critical junctions. Ideally, the complex workplace procedures and production sequences should be broken down and shown in the form of simple, easy-to-understand, and color-coded labels.
Provide adequate safety equipment
Getting the appropriate pieces won’t cost a fortune but all these acquisitions can drastically increase the overall safety level. You can make even better improvements if you make sure that the equipment your employees are going to use matches their unique needs. For instance, the quality of women’s workwear allows provides a much greater range of motion and mobility to female workers than the pieces designed for male coworkers. Left-handed workers should get the tools they can use with optional efficiency, and so on.
Encourage responsible behavior
This can be most easily accomplished by setting up a detailed reward system where any action that will be taken note of, assessed, and, in the end, rewarded and sanctioned. But, you should also do your best to create an open and transparent atmosphere where the issues regarding the overall safety should be discussed publically and without fear of reprimand. Even when workers make one-time mistakes, they need to be aware that such actions don’t carry long-term implications so they shouldn’t hesitate to report them.
Allow enough stretch breaks
All companies should aim for higher productivity but never to the point where tight scheduling causes mistakes, attrition, and drops in concentrations. On the contrary, your workers will be able to work at the optimal performance level only if they are allowed to utilize their skills in short peak bursts and take frequent stretch breaks in between. Once you start looking at scheduling from this perspective you will see that you have more than enough room to keep all of your employees well-rested and fully engaged.
So, there you have it, five simple tips that will help you to drastically improve the overall workplace safety in your company without having to muster substantial financial resources. The most important thing to understand about the safety issues is that all actions you take in addressing these problems tend to produce excellent cumulative results. The more strategies you utilize the effects will grow at an exponential rate. Well, the five examples we gave you should definitely push you in the right direction.