You have many responsibilities as a business owner or manager of a business. However, you should keep in mind that your number one responsibility should always be providing a safe work environment to your employees.
This should even come before your responsibility to customers. Maintaining a safe and secure work environment is by no means easy. Below are a few strategies you can implement to make your workplace safer for your workers.
Perform Safety Training
Beyond nearly anything else, you need to have rigorous employee safety training in place as a business. Without it, you can’t blame employees for not knowing how to maintain a safe and secure work environment. This goes double if employees need to operate machinery and equipment that could conceivably maim or kill.
More complex training programs may be needed if you use specialized equipment in your daily operations. For example, if you are in the automotive industry, vda 6.3 process audit training may need to be deployed to ensure that your employees can identify risks in the automobile production supply chain.
In fact, even work as simple as lifting boxes can prove to be a safety hazard. If those boxes are not lifted correctly, they could end up causing strain on the back that could result in workplace injuries that your workers’ compensation insurance will have to pay for. Employees should be trained on how to lift things without straining their backs in a warehouse environment or anywhere else. Don’t forget that improperly stacking boxes could also create a safety hazard if they were to topple.
Implement OSHA Safety Standards
In regard to workplace safety standards, one governmental agency you should pay attention to is OSHA. OSHA is an acronym that stands for Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it operates under the US Department of Labor. OSHA is the agency that creates rules and regulations for workplace safety that must be maintained by employers. If you fail an OSHA inspection, you can expect heavy fines and possibly even worse penalties. It will be a serious matter.
Overall, giving your workers and managers access to relevant OSHA safety standards can greatly increase the safety of your workplace. You should be able to find standards related to your industry as well as the specific layout of your workplace and the kind of equipment you operate. This includes details such as how to install proper safety railing around elevated areas and steps for preventing nearly any other safety hazard you can think of. Each individual component of your business should have a relevant OSHA safety standard to apply.
Perform Routine Safety Audits
Maintaining a safe workplace also requires becoming aware of safety hazards before they actually manifest into accidents and workplace injuries. One of the more efficient ways to do this is by executing routine safety audits through your buildings to ensure that safety hazards are spotted and removed quickly.
Depending on the danger level of your industry as well as the volume of work you complete, these audits could be performed on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. While a factory workplace certainly requires safety audits, more mundane workplaces like office spaces should also have safety audits performed from time to time. Things like incorrectly installed electric wiring and the lack of proper fire escape paths can prove deadly in an office.
While you may prefer to have your own employees complete such inspections, that may not be the best choice. While you may not want to think that it would be true, your employees may feel the need to overlook safety issues they are responsible for to maintain the appearance of competence or even simply to lower the amount of work they have to complete.
Implementing an independent third-party safety audit service can overcome these problems. Outside professionals may also be able to spot issues that your own employees can’t due to becoming “blind” to problems they have become overly familiar with or used to ignoring.
Conclusion
Overall, safety should always be your highest priority as a business. Three ways you can make certain this is the case is through the implementation of rigorous safety training programs for employees, the strict adoption of OSHA safety standards, and the launch of routine safety audits of your premises. Doing so is certain to greatly increase the safety and security of your workplace and help to prevent serious accidents from occurring.