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Stunning Strategies to Help Your Business Ace Health & Safety

StrategyDriven Risk Management Article
 
Health and safety needs to be a primary concern for any business in the world. If you don’t have the right health and safety mandates in place, you are going to suffer as a business. Nothing is as important these days as health and safety, and you need to make sure you have strong health and safety procedures in place. There are a lot of things you can do to ensure this, and it is vital for the business.

If you are compromised at all with health and safety, you are going to find that your business will be suffering from accidents, lawsuits, and a damaged reputation. This is why you need to do what you can to ensure you are the most safe and secure company you can possibly be. These strategies are going to go a long way toward helping you get the best health and safety mandate possible.

Understand Health & Safety

You have to understand how much health and safety matters in the world of modern business. It is important that you take a look at health and safety and understand what it is, and why it affects the business. Health and safety is how you protect your employees and the future reputation of the company. Businesses with poor health and safety mandates are the ones that wind up struggling.

Ensure Your Employees are Protected

It is also important that you make sure your employees are protected on a daily basis. This means that they need to be trained properly so that they understand what health and safety risks there are in the business. Effective Operational Health and Safety Courses will teach them what they can do to make themselves safer on a daily basis. It is also important for you to get online and look at what you can do to make the workplace safer. You might consider digital security, or here is some protective gear you may want to introduce into the business. Ensuring your employees are protected and kept safe is one of the best ways of acing health and safety.

Fire Drills are Important

You also need to do as much as you can to ensure you have proper drills in place. A fire drill is an essential part of the business health and safety mandate. If a fire breaks out in the business, this can be very destructive, so you need to know how to react in the event of a real fire. This is something that makes a fire drill so important for the business and will allow you to keep your staff safe, and the business assets protected.

Incident Reports

There are a lot of things you can do to improve the way you conduct health and safety in your business. But, one of the major things you can do is to keep logs and incident reports anytime something happens. This is important from a legal perspective, but you also need to refer back to it and understand why the incident might have occurred, as well as how you might be able to prevent it in the future.

As you can see, these are just a few of the wonderful strategies in place that you can use to help boost health and safety. Try to focus on what you can do to improve the working conditions for your employees, and make the working environment safer. These are some of the things that will go a long way toward helping you run the business faster.

How To Make Your Business Safer

As a business owner, you have an important responsibility to ensure the safety of everyone who works for you. Of course, there are always going to be times when accidents happen, but you need to take steps to reduce the odds of this happening. Anything negative or dangerous events which happen at your business and are your responsibility could end up being very destructive and damaging to it. So, let’s take a closer look at a couple of the ways that you can make your business safer for the benefit of both you and your employees.

Develop a Risk Management Policy

The risk management policy which you create for your business very much depends on the type of company that you are running. Obviously, there are some environments which are more dangerous than others, but you still need to take the proper safety precautions even if you just run an office environment. Your risk management program needs to be ongoing and adaptable. After all, there may be new risks which present themselves during the lifespan of your company.

To start off with, look at your current risk management program to see if there are any improvements which you could make to it. Have you set safety goals and are they measurable? Look to your managers and ask how committed they are to workplace safety. If they are not giving this aspect of your company the attention that it deserves, you need to ask why not and reiterate just how important it is to everyone. While everyone should have the same priorities when it comes to protecting staff members, you will probably want to have a few trusted staff members who can lead the initiative.

There are a number of factors involved in creating a risk management policy. First of all, you should conduct some inspections of your property to identify potential risks. You may decide that you need to invest in additional equipment and protective measures such as safety rails. It is worth having an inspection completed by a professional who knows what they are doing and can make recommendations. Be aware of any potential hazards around your work environment including faulty machinery, unsafe practices or things which could result in trips and spills. You also need to ensure that your employees are protected ergonomically and you have dedicated first aiders who can help to handle any emergency situations which may occur. If you have any vehicles which you use for business, these should all be fully insured and taxed.

Put Your Program into Effect

Once you have established your policy, you then need to take steps to put it into effect. To start off with, you should consult your key members of staff to tell them all about your safety practices. These in-person consultations will ensure that you are all on the same page. You should also offer safety training sessions to all your staff members. Provide them with any additional resources as required. It is also important that you have an open-door policy when it comes to offering suggestions from your staff members. After all, they are seeing a totally different side to your business and are well-placed to offer improvements and suggestions that could help you out in the long-run.

Choose the Right Insurance

As we mentioned at the start, you can have all the best measures in place, but sometimes, accidents may happen. For example, your business could suffer from a fire or another act of God which was impossible to predict. Therefore, it is important that you have the right insurance policies to protect you from a wide range of circumstances. If you are not sure what you need and what you don’t, it is always going to be worth consulting with a professional advisor who can steer you onto the right path. Insurance is the one thing that you want your business to have in times of need.

Making your business safer should be one of your main priorities as a responsible company owner. The points listed in this article give you a few of the main things to consider. Of course, every company is different, and you will need to come up with a health and safety policy which is bespoke to your business and covers a wide range of different circumstances and eventualities. When all else fails, it is important that you have the insurance measures in place to keep your business protected.

Reduce the Risks in Your Workplace Right Now

There are so many risks and dangers present in the workplace. As the owner of the company, it’s up to you to minimise them. It’s so easy to just coast along and tell yourself that everything’s fine and dandy. But sooner or later, your lack of safety precautions will catch up with you, and those risks will start to have a real impact on your employees and your business. Here are some great ways in which you can reduce the risks in your workplace right now.

Have Someone Oversee Safety Practices Each Day

Rather than leaving safety and security responsibilities up to each person as they carry out their work, why not hire a person to oversee all of those safety practices? They will then be solely responsible for all of the safety issues in the workplace. It will take a load off the mind of your other employees, and you will know exactly who to go to when there is a safety problem. Each day, they will be able to focus on this and nothing else. Although it will mean spending a bit more money on staffing, it’s something that could really be worthwhile.

StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Article
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Set Rules for the Use of Any Dangerous Machinery

If there is any potentially dangerous machinery in your workplace, you should ensure there is a clear set of rules in place for using it. Everyone should know exactly what to do and what not to do when they are using machinery that poses them a threat. They should be kitted out with the right personal protective equipment. And you can even get lanyards for dangerous roles. These snap off easily so that they don’t get caught in any machinery that is being used by an employee. Make the rules readily available, and offer extra training too if necessary.

Clear the Floor

The floor is where the majority of the dangers lie in waiting in the workplace. Many people don’t take blocked walkways and cluttered floor space anywhere nearly as seriously as they should. If you want to make sure that the floor is clear at all times, survey it each week and look for things that could be hazardous. For example, things shouldn’t be stacked up too high near to where people do their work. When that’s the case, a fall could result in someone getting hurt. And fire escapes definitely need to be kept 100% clear at all times.

StrategyDriven Human Performance Management Article
Photo courtesy of Jeff Wilcox via flickr

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

This is a good general rule to follow when it comes to safety in the workplace. When you are reactive rather than proactive, you will end up not taking extra steps to improve safety until you’re prompted to by something going wrong. That’s far from the ideal situation to be in because it means that you didn’t take risks as seriously as you should have done in the first place. Assess your workplace and carry out risk assessments to spot problems before, not after, they result in someone getting hurt. It’s a sensible and safe approach to take.