words Al Woods
You have several duties as an employer, and one of them is to ensure the safety of everyone who enters your business, including employees and visitors. Depending on the business you work in and the specifics of what you do in your sector, this might include a broad variety of measures.
However, regardless of who you are, how many people you employ, or what you do, you must take health and safety in the workplace extremely seriously. The following are some ideas to help you ensure that your health and safety procedures are sound and that, if necessary, you can enhance workplace health and safety.
Detailed Risk Assessments
One of the many things you’ll learn on any health and safety course is how to do a thorough risk assessment of any situation. This might be a specialized profession requiring risky working techniques (welding, electricity, working at heights, and so on), it could be determining whether you need specialists like machinery movers to help you, or it could simply be a risk evaluation of possible hazards in the workplace environment.
Even if you don’t believe a risk assessment is required, it’s a good practice to develop one for every scenario and for everyone who works for you. For instance, an employee in your business could have a history of heart disease. Conducting a risk assessment could identify that in the event of an emergency it would take too long for first responders to arrive so a defibrillator needs to be kept on site. You can read more here about the necessary first aid signage you would need to have in place in this situation. By fully risk assessing, you can be certain that you’ve made your workplace or workspace as secure as possible, and if problems arise, you can remedy them or provide everyone advice on how to deal with them if they can’t be eliminated.
Ergonomics
Ergonomically designed furniture is something that you can easily put in place in an office to make sure that your employees are safe and comfortable, which will make them more productive and happier at work. Ergonomics is the science of making sure that things like furniture and tools are made to fit the body, not the other way around.
First, each employee’s desk and chair must be comfortable and good for their bodies. Ergonomic chairs are made to support the spine, so they won’t give you back pain. You can also adjust them to the right height for you. The chair and desk must work together so that the worker’s feet are flat on the floor and their eyes are in line with their monitor.
You can also have keyboards that are good for your body in your office. These are made so that your hands can rest in a more natural way, which is supposed to make your muscles feel better. There may also be a need for footrests, wrist rests, and other ergonomic furniture. Look at the places where your team works and see how safe and comfortable they are. If you need to, make any changes that are needed to make sure your team can work in comfort.
Health And Safety Apps
We use our phones for so many different things that it makes sense that we can download health and safety apps to help us be much safer in various areas of our lives, including at work.
There are apps, for example, that will send an alarm to remind the employee to take a break. It’s best to take a few minutes away from the desk and screen every hour, but it’s easy to get caught up in work and forget. There are even programs such as this lone worker app which allow management to make periodic check ins with staff working remotely or on their own with potentially hazardous tasks. Such platforms also provide a way for management to have visibility of all employees in one central location to be able to check in on their welfare.
Beyond this, there are also apps that are aimed at providing information on improving your wellbeing and training people on how to best follow health and safety practices in the workplace. Tell your team about these apps and check in on them every so often to see if they are helping.
The Right PPE
Personal protective equipment (PPE) might not be needed in a typical office setting, but there are jobs that do need it, and it’s your job as an employer to provide it. Not only do you have to give your staff PPE, but it has to be the right kind, of good quality, and you have to teach them how to use it. It’s important to offer PPE that works for everyone. For instance, employees with vision problems may need you top get prescription safety glasses online so that they don’t suffer any impairment when they aren’t wearing their normal glasses. It’s critical to cater to these conditions when considering which PPE to get for your team.
By making sure your employees have the safety gear they need to do their jobs and that they know how to use it, you are helping them and giving them the independence they need to make decisions about their own health and safety. If you didn’t do this and something went wrong, you could be in a lot of trouble.
