Ensuring that you provide your employees with a safe and secure place is not only one of your legal responsibilities – it also makes good financial sense! By preventing on the job injuries and mitigating the number of sick days your staff members take, you will see your organisation’s productivity skyrocket and your bottom line improve.
While workplace health and safety training is imperative and good, solid advice about your responsibilities to your employees is invaluable, it never hurts to take a few simple steps today that can improve the overall health and wellbeing of your company. Here are five savvy ideas that you can implement now.
Improve workplace safety
- Place signs in areas flagged for danger. Placing attractive (and even funny) safety reminder signs in high danger areas around your workplace can be an effective strategy. A gentle (and in no way passive aggressive!) reminder is a good way to keep health and safety tips and policies fresh in your employees’ minds as they carry out their daily duties.
- An employee suggestion hour. Once a month, gather your team members and together have a frank, open conversation about workplace safety. You will learn from the experts – those who work for your company – about what it is like to do their jobs, and they may have excellent common sense suggestions for ways to make their tasks safer and more efficient. If a meeting is not possible, consider a message board or suggestion box.
- Use pictures – Not all people learn best from text-heavy documents – consider using applicable and simple to understand photos and diagrams in your health and safety education programmes. This can really help certain people to get on board and understand why this topic is so important.
- Get your team members involved – Instead of simply dictating that workplace health and safety strategies are important, try to focus on why they are important. If your staff can understand that this is not just one more hoop to jump and is actually a strategy that can improve their wellbeing (not to mention improve their pay cheques and bonuses if the company does well each quarter) then they are much more likely to get on board with your policies.
- Do regular walk-throughs – No matter how big or how small your place of business, you need to ensure that you conduct regular walk-throughs of all areas that are accessed by your employees and members of the general public. By simply keeping your eyes peeled and looking out for dangers with fresh eyes each week (or month) you can discover hazards that might otherwise go unnoticed. Find yourself a bit desensitised to your surroundings after years in the same environment? Ask a different colleague or staff member to do the walkthrough with you each time.
These are just a few of the simple tips that you can follow in order to help improve your workplace safety – and ultimately improve your business overall.
