The Real Savvy Ways To Keep Your Employees Safe At Work

As an employer, the safety of your people is paramount. Regardless of whether you have a staff of ten or ten thousand, you have to do all you can to keep them safe at all times – and you have to be seen doing it too. This is the kind of thing that can be both simpler and more complex than you might have assumed, albeit in different ways. But the question is, what are some of the really savvy ways in which you can hope to keep your employees safe at work?

Here we are going to look at the main ones of these that you might want to be aware of. Some of these might be obvious to you, but there will hopefully be at least a couple that are less so, and which you can learn a great deal from, so let’s see what they are and what you might want to consider.

Provide Good Training

A lot can be achieved with safety if you first make a point of providing good training to your staff, and this is therefore one of the main things that you are going to need to think about. There are of course lots of different kinds of training that are relevant for the safety of everyone, so you need to make sure that you are aware of all of them, and that you lay out a proper schedule for that training that everyone can follow too.

You need to be on top of this schedule, of course, to ensure that nobody gets missed out. And it is going to be essential that you are doing all you can to provide good quality training too. A lot of companies achieve this by outsourcing the training to someone who is used to doing it, and that is certainly one approach you may want to consider.

However you do it, just make sure that you are providing the training your employees really need when they need it. That is going to help them keep a lot safer on the job at all times.

Give Everyone ID Badges

This is a notably very simple way to keep a workplace safe, and yet it’s one that a lot of businesses still don’t make good use of. If you want to turn that around, it will be for the benefit of all who work for you, so it’s certainly something you will want to think about. Giving everyone ID badges is a really straightforward means of having control over who is able to enter the premises – and that’s a massively important way of keeping everyone safe in that workplace on the whole.

Of course, an employee ID badge has other benefits too, such as allowing people to start up conversations with one another more easily, and helping to foster a sense of community at work. But most of all, it allows your security team to ensure that nobody enters who shouldn’t. You can even use such a system to allow for different levels of authorisation in different discrete parts of the building – a nice touch if you have any particularly sensitive information that you need to keep to a few people only.

Keep The Lines Of Communication Open

Most business owners know that communication is one of the most essential tools throughout a business for so many reasons and in so many ways. Well, it’s certainly true that it’s a particularly useful tool when it comes to trying to keep everyone safe at work, and that the savvy approach is to actually make sure that you are keeping the lines of communication open as best as you can throughout the workplace.

Why this works is simple. The more able your workers feel to speak up, the more likely it is that you are going to be kept in the loop about any problems that might appear, including safety issues that have the potential to worsen or become more worrying. So it’s going to prove extremely useful to have everyone feeling safe to speak.

A lot of this comes down to the kind of working culture you promote. This should obviously ideally be as open and understanding as possible, and one where every individual is shown the respect they deserve. Just that can be a really powerful step towards making it so that everyone feels a lot more able to speak up. You might be amazed at how much of a difference this can really make.

Hold People Accountable

Despite the fact that you as the employer arguably have the bulk of the responsibility when it comes to safety at work, everyone – as we mentioned at the top of this article – has some role to play. And the real savvy business leader knows that it’s vital to hold people accountable to what they are doing, and how they are doing it, if you want to make sure that everyone is truly safe at work at all times.

What this actually looks like in a day-to-day sense is something else altogether. It can often be as simple as ensuring that you have regular one-on-one meetings with your staff, so that they know you are keeping up with them. Or you might want to think about having a proper system in place for what to do when someone does something unsafe. This is the kind of approach that can really make a world of difference in the long run. When people know that they are being held accountable for their actions, you will be able to watch as the workplace becomes significantly safer.

Never Put Profit Above People

Thankfully, this is an attitude that is becoming all but extinct, and not a moment too soon. But just in case you were tempted: it is never worthwhile to put profit above people in your dealings in business. That can manifest in a lot of ways. It might be shortcutting where it’s not safe to do so, in order to save a little money for the company. Or it might mean not providing your people with everything they need to be safe, because you would rather spend time and money on researching a new product idea. There are countless other examples of what it can look like when a company puts profit above people, but they all have one thing in common: they look ugly.

You don’t want that look from your company and nor do you want the possible resulting lack of safety on your head, either, so do all you can to resist this approach to doing business. It’s quite the reverse that you want to instill in your processes: people first, always, and especially with regard to their safety. Ultimately this is going to mean you always have a workforce to utilize in the first place, and it will help to keep you morally where you should be too.

The Magic Of Risk Assessments

Risk assessments are really quite a simple thing, albeit something that you need to make sure you are doing as well as you can, and as frequently as necessary. A risk assessment is simply where you ensure that any given circumstance at work has been analyzed for its potential risks, which have then been brought to a minimum risk potential. Doing these is a legal requirement, and a fundamentally powerful way to ensure you are keeping your people safe, so bear that in mind as best as you can here and it should make a difference.