If you want your business to be a success, you absolutely cannot afford to skimp on workplace safety measures. Doing so could not only lead to employee or customer injuries, but it would also leave you on the wrong side of the law and with a reputation in tatters.
With that in mind, here are some tips to help you and your small business ensure that workplace safety is a priority.
Make it a priority
If you’re serious about creating a safe workplace, then you need to make safety a top business priority. Ideally, you should start by looking at the rules and regulations for your sector to ensure that you are following them all to the letter. Then, you should look at anything extra you can do, that may not be legally required, but which will keep you, your employees and your customers safer.
Get the right insurances
Okay, so this won’t exactly make your workplace safer, but it will ensure you are protected should something go wrong. For example, if you use motorcycle couriers, ensuring that they have the right accident and injury cover, as well as liability insurance will make it easier when dealing with your local motorcycle accident attorneys, or having public liability insurance will ensure that if a customer has an accident on your premises, your insurance will cover any costs and litigation. It just makes sense.
Medically train your staff
Offering your employees medical training is a great way to make your business safer. Even if only a fraction of your team takes up the offer, that means that if someone has an accident or a medical emergency onsite, there will be people right on hand who can help while you wait for the ambulance to come. To ensure that people do take up the offer, it’s good to have some incentives like a staff bonus to encourage them in the right direction.
Create a stress-free environment
When employees are stress, they are more likely to make mistakes, and this could lead to accidents and injuries, so as a business owner, you should do whatever you can to make your workplace as stress-free as possible. This could be as simple as adding more natural light and plants, which have been shown to lower stress, or something more complex like offering meditation classes, implementing flexible working policies or even making remote working a bigger thing. Anything you can do to reduce stress will help.
You should also ensure that your business premises have essential design features that promote workplace comfort and ease stress. For example, installing automatic opening vents can improve daily ventilation and offer an effective escape route for heat. That can help make your workers more comfortable, especially in workplace environments that experience a lot of heat and smoke buildup. You can take the time to learn more about automatic opening vents and their benefits.
Conduct regular risk assessments
Conducting regular risk assessments will enable you to identify and deal with any potential health and safety breaches in your workspace, which is why you should ideally carry them out every month, even if you don’t technically need to do so that often.
Keep the place clean
Hiring a good cleaning team will help to ensure that there is nothing people can trip or slip[ and fall over and that germs and other hazards are removed as often as possible. This is especially important now with the threat of coronavirus still looming.
Keep your business safe and you are more likely to prosper, ti really is that simple.
