Keeping your employees safe is something that you should constantly be thinking about. It’s important to keep everyone that comes onto your business premises or workplace as safe as possible. Accidents happen, everyone knows that, but you need to be willing to put in the effort to show that you have taken every reasonable precaution to avoid them from happening. That means that you need to understand how people could possibly get injured, and from there you can start doing things to avoid it. However, we’re not going to get into too many specifics, but we are going to look at how you can keep your employees safe. Keep reading down below if you would like to find out more.
Regular Building Maintenance
The first thing that you should be doing is regular business building maintenance. This is things like making sure that the electrical sockets are all on properly and not faulty, ensuring that the structure is in good condition, that the floorboards aren’t sticking up in certain places, and so on. It’s not the most difficult job in the world, but it does require the person to have attention to detail. When you are hiring a maintenance person for the business, ensure that they have a keen eye for what is going on around them. If you want your business premises to be safe, this person has got to be on the ball as much as often.
You should also have a box for people to drop a note in if they notice something that isn’t quite right on this side of things. Then, the maintenance person can get around to fixing certain things faster as he will know about more of them. Even if they have a keen eye for detail, they won’t be able to pick up on absolutely everything alone.
If They Work With Heavy Equipment
Another thing that you should do is make sure that anyone who is working with heavy equipment is properly qualified to do so. It may be the case that they just need a certificate from a one-off course, and there is nothing wrong with this. You just need to make sure that you send them to the training course and that you have a copy of the certificate. The last thing that you want is for someone to get injured because they weren’t properly qualified to use the equipment that their job demanded of them.
If heavy machinery is involved, everyone should be careful around it. You never know what is going to happen at any given time, so precautions are the best way forward. We also want to say that you should maintain your machinery well to ensure that nothing goes wrong. For example, vapor abrasive blasting is one way to get rid of any corrosion that may be occurring. You may be sitting there thinking ‘how does vapor abrasive blasting work’ and that’s something that you can look up.
Follow All Health And Safety Guidelines
Healthy and safety guidelines are there to stop people from getting hurt, so really you need to be following them as much as you possibly can. It’s not a game that you can just ignore because you don’t feel like spending the money to implement changes, or you don’t feel like going through the process of implementing them. This is a huge mistake though, as if someone does get hurt, you are going to be solely responsible for not taking reasonable measures to ensure that it didn’t happen. As such, we highly recommend that you start taking a look at all of the guidelines for your business and work your way through them.
If you’re not sure whether or not you are complying with these rules, you can always ask a lawyer what they think. They will know all about this and be able to advise you on the best way to carry out the instructions in the guidelines. Having legal help on your side will help to ensure that you are doing everything well.
Take No Chances
You should not be willing to take any kind of chance with the health and safety of either your employees or your customers. So, if you think that something is dangerous, or has the potential to become dangerous, then you should absolutely get it sorted sooner rather than later. If you can’t get it looked at for a couple of days, then you need to come up with a plan accordingly. For example, if the problem is with the ceiling in a certain part of the building, get everyone out of there and don’t let them back in until it has been taken care of. It’s an unnecessary risk and one that would be ridiculous to take.
A collapsed ceiling isn’t something you can just work around, so you need to learn more about how to go about fixing it. Hire a contractor, have them come and take a look, and then you can go from there. But, it’s not worth risking an injury on something that you are not sure about. It’s always better to be safe than sorry they say, so now’s a good time to put that into practice.
Ensure There Is Proper Signage
Your business should always have proper signage when it comes to health and safety. This means that the fire exits should be clearly marked in the event of a fire, you should make sure that there are wet floor signs on all surfaces that are wet, and so on. You need to be careful here because if someone does get injured, and they say that it happened because there was a lack of signs, you’re the one who is going to be in the wrong.
We’re not saying that you are going to need to go overboard with this and give every single thing a sign, but the things that could be dangerous definitely should be.
Security On The Premises
If you want to keep your business, your employees, and your customers safe, then you need to have security on the premises. There is no such thing as too many precautions, which is why you should have CCTV pointing at all angles with no blindspot if possible and have security guards who are ready to jump to action when needed. Hire someone to monitor the security cameras, don’t try to get the security team to do it as this will distract them from their other tasks.
The tighter security you have, the more of a deterrent it is against people who would seek to harm the business. We can’t guarantee for sure that nothing is going to happen, but the added security should be enough to scare anyone away. If they are then silly enough to try anyway, you will have them caught in no time so that they don’t get the chance to hurt you at all.
We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now see some of the things that you are going to need to do to keep your employees safe. This is an important part of being the boss, as you are responsible for all of these people for the hours that they are working for you. As such, you need to make the effort to keep everything in the best possible condition and keep your employees safe. We wish you the very best of luck and hope that you now have some ideas to implement into your business if you haven’t been taking all of the precautions that you should have been up to now.