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When you run a business, it is extremely important that you take good care of your employees, after all, they are the most important asset you have, and more importantly, their safety should be paramount.

What’s more, if you fail to take adequate care of your employees you could end up with a lawsuit or expensive litigation proceedings on your hands and your business may be shut down for good.

With that in mind, here are some of the very best ways to improve safety in your business starting right now:

1. Create a culture of safety

Perhaps, the best thing you can do to help keep your employees safe at work is to foster a culture of safety where everyone knows the rules and regulations required to make the workplace safe and also knows just how important that is.

If all of your employees are fully on board with the safety message, they are more likely to conduct themselves in a safe manner, and hopefully, accidents can be avoided. Creating the right culture amongst your staff will ensure that tasks, such as locking up the Battery Cabinet and switching off equipment, will become second nature.

2. Train, train and train some more

On a related note, it is very important that you train new employees in best health and safety practices, but it is also important that you continue adding to and revising their training over the years as your business practices change and evolve. Ensuring your employees know how to don and doth protective gear, from a simple apron to a more intricate gas mask, for example, could save lives. Investing in safety training isn’t all that expensive and when you think about how much money you could potentially save by avoiding various health and safety breaches and the resultant compensation claims, bad press, etc., not to mention the potential harm that could come to your employees, then it makes perfect sense to keep up with training, even if it isn’t a legal requirement to do so. Once the training is complete and the team have their certificates, you could put them all in acrylic photo frames from Luminati so they are on display at all times; another great reminder to all of the importance of the training and a guide to ensure they remember what they learned.

3. Incentivise your employees

Something else that you can do, which is really easy to implement, is to incentivise your employees to practise safe behaviour. Offering your staff rewards for every day/week/month without any safety breaches is a good way to really focus their minds and give them an extra reason to be careful when at work, and it needn’t cost you a lot of money to implement either.

4. Invest in the best safety equipment

If you want to minimise the risks your employees face each day at work, then you may need to think about spending a bit more to invest in the highest quality safety equipment you can find. Whether it’s the gold standard in safety goggles or these excellent SCBA breathing apparatus, providing our employees with the best tools for the job is the least you need to do to keep your business safe for everyone involved, and if that means spending more, well it will be worth it when you don’t have to deal with the consequences of a major accident. Items, such as chemical storage containers, can be vital to ensure the safety of both clients and employees; click here for further information.

5. Put up signage

A really inexpensive way of reducing accidents is to put up signage around the workplace to remind people how to work safely. Labelling any equipment that may be dangerous is also a must. This will cost you little more than the cost of paper and ink, but it can really help to cut down on workplace accidents quite significantly. Just make sure you double-check signage/labels before you use them or you could end up giving the wrong information and having the opposite effect to that desired. Don’t forget to make sure that your equipment is properly labelled and visible, too. You can also consider using barriers to protect both your assets and workforce. Click here for collapsible barriers that can help keep staff and visitors safe too.

6. Hire a good cleaning team

Cleaners are often wrongly overlooked in the workplace, although thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and the vital role cleaning staff have paid that is starting to change, and so it should because a good cleaning team are worth their weight in gold. Why? Because cleaners are the people who mop up spills, pick up potentially hazardous debris and get rid of the kind of clutter that could cause someone to slip trip or fall. They are an important part of keeping your business safe, and as such, you should employ the best cleaning team you can afford and treat them very well indeed.

7. Inspect equipment regularly

It should go without saying, but it’s really important to regularly inspect any workplace equipment that your employees are going to be using. When equipment is inspected regularly, you can identify any potential issues before they cause an accident. For the same reason, equipment should be serviced and repaired on a very regular basis too. Malfunctioning machinery is one of the most common causes of workplace accidents, so you need to do everything you can to avoid them. You’ll also want to make sure that things like the electricity that powers your business is in good working order, so keeping on top of inspections and getting your EICR Certificates is equally important when it comes to health and safety. 

8. Give your employees more breaks

You might be wondering what this has to do with workplace safety, but it’s a really important step to take if you want to avoid accidents. After all, the more fatigued, the more stressed-out people are, the most likely they are to make a mistake, Most of the time these mistakes will be minor, but occasionally they will not and that would be really bad for all involved. By giving your employees more frequent breaks than is strictly necessary, you can keep them safe and keep them alert.

9. Listen to your employees

Making it clear to your employees that they can come to you at any time with any concerns they may have and they will be treated seriously, and with respect should they do so, is a really good way of identifying any potential hazards in the workplace. Your employees work with your equipment, and their fellow employees, every day, so they are often the first people to notice that something is wrong. If they feel like you don’t want to know or they’ll be punished for mentioning it, they won’t speak out and you won’t have time to act before disaster strikes, so be a good boss, keep the dialogue open, and actually listen when your staff speak. That is the best way to ensure that you maintain a good safety record.

10. Measure safety

Of course, it’s really hard to improve your safety record and prevent disasters if you don’t already know what you are doing and where you may need to improve as a company, which is why you will need to find a method to measure the safety of your business right now and as time goes on. Recording any incidents that happen is a legal requirement in most places, but if you’re serious about safety, you may want to take some time to analyse the data, spot any trends and so what you can to mitigate against them, do this each month and soon you should be seeing fewer and fewer incidents overall.

11. Don’t get complacent

Complacency has killed more people than almost anything else. If you take your eye off the business safety ball for even a second, things could start to slide and injuries will be inevitable. Don’t let that happen by making safety a constant focus of your business operations now and going forward. It is the only way to ensure that things don’t go spectacularly wrong.

As you can see, there are lots of things you can do to improve safety in your business, and most of them are just good common sense. It’s important that you try to implement as many of them as you possibly can because safety problems can’t be solved with a single solution as much as we might want that to be the case. Implement as many of these practices as you can now and work on adding the rest as soon as you are able and stay safe.

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