All too often tales of businesses who have taken shortcuts and not taken their workforce’s and clientele’s health and safety into account emerge. Health and Safety for your Workforce and Clientele are very important. While the saying goes that all publicity is good publicity, being known as the cause of an employee’s or customer’s ill-health or even fatality can never be spun in a positive light.
Here are eight key considerations to help you to improve the health and safety of your workforce and clientele.
1. Review the current situation
The first thing on the list of things to consider is linked to when you last looked at the health and safety rules, regulations, and issues within your business. Regularly, it is imperative for businesses to review their existing practices and analyze which areas need work. This should not be solely carried out by senior management as they can potentially miss things that apply to lower-level employees, those on the ground, so to speak. Indeed, taking notice of what your staff say about all matters, health and safety included, is essential to being a communication-rich environment.
2. Regularly check and update equipment
Equipment that has not been assessed recently could lead to disaster. It is essential to check it all on a regular basis. When something is found to be below par, it may be necessary to consider if it is worth fixing. Alternatively, a replacement or an update may be sought. Doing this will also lead to fewer frustrations from your workforce with everything, such as technology, working as it should be.
3. Organize employees’ training
A small number of employees will be required to undertake specific health and safety training. For example, it might be in the area of keeping hazardous materials or it may be fire safety. Usually, this training lasts for a minimum of a year. Keeping records of staff training will be helpful in ensuring that you always have someone trained on your staff.
Many courses only allow refresher training if done within a certain period, otherwise the staff members may have to have the full training once more. In addition to the people who have health and safety on their list of responsibilities at work, you should also consider regular briefings or light-touch training for everyone else. It falls on everyone to ensure they are able to spot areas of weakness and report them accordingly.
4. Look at private healthcare
Most companies support their employees by offering either discounted or free access to private healthcare insurance. Not only is this a fantastic benefit to working for your business, but it also incentivizes employees to remain loyal to you. In turn, ensuring that your staff members can actually see a doctor when they need to, rather than having to save up to pay the price first, you are likely to find that your absent levels are much lower than they otherwise would be.
5. Support after incidents
Regardless of how many measures you put into place to try to prevent any major health and safety related incidents, they can and will happen unfortunately. Whether it is seeking the support of commercial truck accident attorneys for one of your employees or employing the services of a counsellor to help staff come to terms with something that has happened. Sometimes, the impact of an incident can be traumatic for any individual involved. Likewise, there must be some level of support for any of your clientele who was involved. Of course, monetary compensation ought to be sorted as long as you have adequate insurance, such as public liability.
6. Put up signs and posters
You can verbally tell people, both your staff and customers, safety-related things many times. However, it is human nature to forget some things. Therefore, it is advisable to ensure signs and posters are displayed, reminding people of any actions they should take or anything they should avoid doing or touching, for example. You should take disabled employees and clients into account, too, ensuring that signs and posters are available in alternative format, should they be required.
7. Carry out workstation risk assessments
While it is normal to carry out risk assessments across the property, sometimes, employees’ own individual requirements are forgotten. To ensure that they have the right set-up when it comes to their workstations, you could hire you could hire the services of someone who can check that the chair is set to the right height to ensure that the person does not have bad posture.
The same goes for the height of the computer monitor. it is essential that these risk assessments or carried out regularly when the individual circumstances of one of your employees changes. For example, if a member of staff becomes pregnant, that needs will change and therefore, it’s a company’s responsibility to check that everything is in place, thus ensuring that there was a lower chance of the member of staff being in pain as a result of a poor workstation setup.
8. Keep the workplace clean and tidy
Having a dirty and untidy workplace can lead to a number of health and safety concerns. Not only could dirt and grime cause illness, but they can also be attributed as the cause of machine malfunctions. Furthermore, for any visiting customers or potential clients, it looks unprofessional. Employing the services of an experienced and highly rated cleaning team is essential to ensure your building remains the very best it can be.
Additionally, an untidy work environment can be problematic, too. For example, if you have a store cupboard where things are put to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’, boxes piled up badly could result in a severe injury for a member of staff. Invest in storage cupboards to ensure that everything has a home, meaning the building will be much tidier and well organized. This approach can also lead to better efficiency, with staff not having to search high and low for items as it is obvious where they should be found.
