Your employees are single-handedly the most valuable asset to your business. Equipment slowly expires before it gathers dust, and your premises are subject to constant wear and tear. However, your workforce is consistently beneficial. Remember, your team can actively demonstrate your company values, exercise innovation, and carry your operations to success! Therefore, you must protect your staff in every way possible. Health and safety must visibly be a priority for a sustainable and satisfactory workplace.
Here’s how to prioritise health & safety in the workplace and exhibit how highly you value your staff.
1. Understand Legal Health & Safety Expectations
Before implementing effective health and safety measures, you must understand legal expectations! As an employer, you must meet the criteria to support staff during the working day. The government provides guidelines to ensure you’re covering every base and adequately protecting employees from harm.
Your Duty Of Care As An Employer Includes:
- Ensuring machinery is safe to use.
- Offering health supervision where necessary.
- Avoiding dangerous manual handling or taking precautions where lifting is essential.
- Taking steps to check safe working practices are established and followed.
- Reporting accidents, injuries and diseases to the local authority.
- Providing accessible first aid facilities.
- Illustrating potential hazards with signage.
- Setting up emergency plans.
- Purchasing suitable material handling equipment and ensuring stock is stored correctly.
- Checking ventilation, lighting, temperature and break facilities meet welfare requirements.
- Providing well-maintained personal protective equipment.
2. Designate A Health & Safety Responsible Person
Despite being the business owner and employer, you mightn’t be on the premises daily. It would help if you appointed a senior staff member to oversee health and safety operations when you aren’t around. The responsible person must feel comfortable exercising authority, and it’d be helpful if they were first aid trained. As well as checking that safety signs are visible and hazards are reduced, your appointed person should also report accidents and near-misses.
Though it can be tempting to share health and safety duties between all staff members, you shouldn’t. Once you’re faced with managing a team of volunteers, it is easy for responsibilities to be assigned and subsequently forgotten, leaving everybody unsure of their role. If you’re going to split duties, try to appoint no more than two responsible people to cover your building at all times.
3. Regularly Assess Equipment For Faults
Industrial equipment enables efficient work in your warehouse or your commercial building! However, any machinery can prove dangerous if it isn’t well maintained and regularly serviced. Errors can spring out of nowhere and injure your employees, leading to hefty insurance payouts and time off work. You’ll avoid the hassle if your responsible person arranges an annual electric tug service, or they routinely inspect forklifts before they’re used.
If you aren’t capable of completing inspections on your own, you must hire a professional. At Industar, we understand you’re pressed for time managing your commercial premises, but ensuring your equipment is safe to handle needs to be a prime concern. Your staff should complete their roles fully confident they won’t be injured.
4. Train All Employees In Health & Safety
Your responsible person cannot oversee every operation in every corner of your building at all times. Therefore, all staff members must be aware of your behavioural expectations! Effective health and safety training will cover handling machinery sensibly, navigating your workplace, and first aid basics. You never know when an incident or a near-miss could occur, and you can’t rely purely on your management team to protect everybody.
Teaching your workforce about secure material handling is critical. Anybody operating moving machinery needs relevant support, including electric tow tug training or a licence. Without adequate knowledge, your staff could injure themselves and one another or damage your assets with unsatisfactory operations.
5. Highlight The Importance Of Uniform
Personal protective equipment can be the difference between life and death. High visibility jackets allow any labourer to be seen in dark conditions, and a hard hat prevents serious head injuries. Any item you introduce to workplace uniforms will have a unique purpose, and staff must respect the instructions you deliver. Employees who don’t respect your policies put themselves at risk, as well as your company reputation. A complete and undamaged uniform is a non-negotiable requirement.
Your responsible person can conduct spot checks to ensure staff are appropriately clothed. Anybody who does not comply with your standards can be subjected to disciplinary action, so you demonstrate how highly you value health and safety in your workplace.
6. Cultivate A Responsible Workplace Culture
When you’re deeply concerned about the welfare of your staff, it is obvious. Health and safety dictate every decision you make, and you won’t introduce practices or machinery that threatens wellbeing. As you personally uphold the safety standards you’ve established, staff will follow in your footsteps. After all, if they witness you cutting corners to save time and money, they’re likely to believe that’s acceptable. On the other hand, your team will also clean after themselves if they witness you setting an excellent example and treating the workplace with respect. Responsible workplace culture will hold every person accountable for their actions, no matter their position.
As you maintain your integrity following health and safety rules, you’ll also encourage staff to trust you. Subsequently, all employees will feel comfortable approaching you with risks and hazards they’ve noticed. Remember, health isn’t only physical. Your team should feel their mental health is supported too, and an approachable reputation is vital to guarantee that.
7. Remember More Can Always Be Done
Finally, never believe that you’ve ticked every box when it comes to health and safety in your workplace. Unexpected risks can suddenly introduce themselves, and machinery can malfunction out of the blue. Suppose you consistently assess your business’ approach to protecting your staff. In that case, you won’t miss opportunities to service your tools and refresh personal protective equipment. Investing in the health and safety of your employees is a continual job.
We’ll support your efforts at Industar. Our electric tow tugs provide safer manual handling, so you needn’t stress operating a forklift. Additionally, we can protect your staff with training sessions and machine maintenance. Contact us to discover how new material handling equipment can refresh your business and empower your employees.