Practical and Smart Ways You Can Prevent Injuries From Happening In The Workplace
When you take measures to ensure that your workplace is deemed safe for work, you save your company from incurring costs and give your employees morale to work effectively. As an employer, it’s up to you to ensure injuries in the workplace are avoided or reduced to the bare minimum; that your workers are always safe and healthy. A healthy work environment boosts productivity among your staff and has a positive impact on your production unit.
According to research by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workplace injuries have been quite common with approximately 2.8 million nonfatal injuries recorded in 2017. That means roughly three out of every 100 employees are involved in workplace injuries.
Even though certain occupational injuries might be out of your control, you can still be in charge and take certain steps to avoid unexpected accidents where you work. Use these practical and smart ways to prevent injury and improve your employee’s safety.
1. Reinforce The Company’s Safety Rules
Safety rules are one of the overlooked regulations ever because it’s easy to take it with laxity when no injuries have occurred in the workplace. When someone isn’t wearing their PPE, there’s a high tendency that you’d overlook it the first time. But in doing so, that act can quickly become a usual practice among your employees as such leading to them disregarding any safety rule you might have put together.
If that continues and a worker gets injured on the job, it is possible they may file a claim against you for neglecting safety in the workplace. This would ultimately lead to more issues for your firm which could have been easily avoided if you enforced that the rules were followed.
2. Don’t Encourage Your Employees to Take Unnecessary Risks
There are times where accidents in the workplace are a result of employees trying to push themselves too hard or wanting to impress their colleagues with their strength. They might also want to increase their current output hoping they get a raise. It is also possible they were injured prior to working and haven’t fully recovered.
While as an employer it’s important that you get your staff to be very productive and creative, it’s better to encourage them to embrace innovation, not accident-inducing risk. When it counts, get experts to speak with them about these issues. If your company is based in California, get Los Angeles personal injury lawyers to come to lay it as it is for them. Ensure they understand your stand on their well-being that an employee’s safety is worth more to you than an increase in productivity.
3. Review Your Safety Policies and Procedures
At certain times within the year including after workplace accidents, review the safety policies of your company. Has your firm changed the way they operate, started using different equipment, changed locations, or expanded? Put your health and safety committee together and update the policy documents.
After doing that, communicate new updates to your entire staff. Send a bulk email highlight every detailing the minor changes and if the process is ongoing, ensure you keep them updated as it goes on.
4. Get The Right Equipments & Safety Gears
In industries like engineering and construction, getting the correct tools and equipment would go a long way in preventing workplace injuries. There are basic but sophisticated equipment such as hard hats, reflective vests/jackets, safety goggles, and safety boots.
These protective equipment are needed to keep your employees safe. They should never be lacking but always be in excess in case a client comes for inspection or one of your staff loses one theirs. You’re not spending excessively when you have extra gear at hand, you’re saving yourself and your company hundreds to millions of dollars in compensation in case anything goes wrong.
5. Maintain A Strict Hiring Process
There might be times when you are short on staff and in dire need to hire new employees very quickly. It’s quite easy to not consider some important details because you’re hiring under pressure and time-constraint, but that could lead to an unwanted accident as you’re not entirely certain the person is capable of the position they applied for.
Assuming the position needs a certain physique or the ability to lift at over 50 pounds, hiring a person who can’t do that would ultimately lead to them being injured in the process. That’s why you need to maintain a strict hiring process that you can bank on. It’s better to be understaffed in good health than to have enough staff with multiple injury cases reported.
Accidents happen in the workplace more often than not. The risks and hazards faced by employers are high. It is the responsibility of both the employer and employee to ensure that the workplace is safe.
