Monitoring health & safety in the work place

I shouldn’t need to tell you that health and safety in the workplace is paramount, not just for your employee but for your business too. By not taking the necessary precautions you’re putting employees at risk and opening yourself up to a whole host of law suits.

Here we’re going to give you a few hints and tips to help ensure that you have the necessary safety nets in place.

Consult employees

The best way to understand the risks involved in your workplace is to speak to your employees. Ask them how they go about their day to day roles and then asses the risks that this poses. This way you can take necessary action to eliminate those risks.

Records

I highly recommend recording all the health and safety measures that you put in place. This shouldn’t just be a matter of writing what you have done. You should also keep a record of the process that brought you to the solution.

This will act as proof that you’ve implemented risk assessment and health and safety measures should you need it.

Training

The most important part of ensuring that your employees are safe is to provide them with complete training. For example: if they operate heavy machinery they should have all the necessary training to operate the machines correctly.

Failing to train your employees could end up with a serious injury on your hands – with you at fault. Look at each role within your business and consider how the staff could be better trained to go about their work in a safe manner.

Maintenance

If your staff work with machinery then you must make sure that it’s well taken care of. If one item is neglected it could easily worsen over time posing a risk to your employees. Regularly conduct tests on each machine to ensure that it’s in complete working order and if isn’t, have it repaired immediately.

Too many businesses neglect maintenance and it ends up costing them dearly.

First aid

On top of training your staff members to go about their work safely you should also make sure that at least one member of each department is first aid trained. This means that if there is an accident, there will be someone on hand who can correctly provide first aid to the victim. It could save a life.

Correct health and safety isn’t hard to implement and it’ll make your workplace a much safer environment for everyone involved.