8 Health and Safety Tips in the Workplace

Workplaces lose billions every year from injuries, illnesses, and disabilities that are avoidable in a lot of cases. Small adjustments in health and safety actions go a long way in reducing the likelihood of someone getting hurt. However, this takes planning, commitment, action, and collaboration to create a truly safe workplace for everyone.

Here are some health and safety tips in the workplace to ensure everyone’s protected:-

1. Health & Safety Training

The best way to avoid a health and safety incident is to ensure every employee has health and safety training. Safety First Consulting offers a variety of training courses to teach workers about health safety protocols in the workplace. Use these courses to ensure your workforce follows the necessary procedures.

Employees need to know how to act in the event of an emergency so that a safety incident doesn’t grow to be worse and to protect others. Furthermore, health and safety training should be something updated annually, ensuring everyone is fully abreast of safety expectations.

2. Health & Safety Representative

A health and safety rep will be there to identify hazards, recommend changes, and ensure unsafe conditions aren’t maintained. They’re also a way for management to peer into the real experiences of workers on the floor from a health and safety perspective.

Make a point of encouraging employees to come forth with any concerns or if they ever feel unsafe. This will hopefully lead to necessary health and safety changes before an injury occurs and can even save lives.

3. Health & Safety Meetings

An open dialogue is something every employer wants to have with their workforce. A regular safety meeting is important to getting hazards reported, identifying potential concerns, and prioritizing safety. In a meeting, you can also review health and safety standards, and communicate to workers the importance of safety.

It may seem like being over-prepared or like it’s too much. When it comes to maintaining safety, these meetings can be kind reminders that save someone a career-ending injury or worse.

4. Health & Safety Equipment

It’s not ok to not use the safety equipment available to someone. If there’s safety equipment mandated to be used in a given act, wear it, use it, and don’t leave it on the bench. Safety equipment is there for a reason. If someone doesn’t want to use it, they shouldn’t be in the role they’re in.

Malfunctioning equipment, improperly-maintained machinery, and misusing tools are all paths down which someone can get hurt. All equipment should be put on a maintenance schedule. Tools that are broken or compromised should also be replaced.

5. Health & Safety Protocols

Health and safety procedures are crafted to be a certain way. No one should be taking shortcuts. That goes for both the employer and employee. You can still work safely and be efficient. Shortcuts have no place in a high-risk work setting.

The reason why a lot of people rush or compromise their health and safety is because the standards for performance are too high. Creating unrealistic expectations for work is something many employers are guilty of. When it finally leads to an injury, this emphasiizzes the importance of why performance standards must be set at the right level.

6. Emergency Exits

If the worst-case scenario plays out, a workplace should have an exit strategy ready to go. Emergency exist should be kept clear, easily accessible at all times. Any heavy machinery shut-offs should also be easily accessible and employees should know where to touch if a safety incident occurs.

7. Clean Workplaces

Don’t wait for a free moment to clean up a messy workplace. Messes lead to slips and falls. Avoidable injuries are to be avoided. Tangled cables, cardboard boxes, or disorganized tools create hazards that can be hard to move around and work with. The best process is to try not to create the mess. When the mess has to be created though, as a by-product of something else, clean it up right away.

8. Work Hazards

A worker may be unsafe for several reasons. They may be overworked or aren’t rested and alert. They may be doing drugs or alcohol on the job. They may be innocently on a new medication that’s unknowingly compromising their alertness. Also, if they’re new, they just might not know what’s expected.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might be creating unsafe work conditions. Remove the worker from the floor and find out what’s going on. In certain situations, they may have to be retrained on health and safety standards.