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Most employers are more diligent now than ever in staying on top of workplace safety issues. However, workplace accidents are still prevalent. In fact, millions of employees suffer work-related injuries every year.
Maintaining a safe workplace for your employees and customers can be a costly affair. However, it can save you the problems that accompany workplace-related injuries. These include expensive lawsuits and huge amounts of cash you may have to pay injured victims as compensation.
If you are starting a business or hoping to improve your business safety approach, here are some critical health and safety considerations to keep in mind.
1. Use Wet Floor Signs to Avoid Slips and Falls
According to OSHA, slips, trips, and falls contribute to more than 700 deaths per year. These types of accidents are responsible for most work-related injuries. Slip and fall accidents are pretty common safety issues in grocery stores. They mainly result from wet surfaces due to accidental oil or water spillage.
One way of minimizing liability for slip and fall accidents on your premises is to put up wet floor signs when wiping the floor or if there is spillage in a particular area.
Erecting wet floor signs may not absolve you from the responsibility of ensuring the safety of your premises. Nonetheless, it can help prove that you made a reasonable effort to prevent an accident.
If you suffer harm on private premises in a slip and fall accident, the personal injury lawyers at Finkelstein and Partners will assist you in pursuing the right compensation.
2. Perform Regular Drills to Minimize Everyday Safety Issues
Most employers avoid conducting drills. This is likely because they can be tiresome and sometimes time-consuming. But they are worth the time and effort in the long run.
To most people, drills are only for major emergencies like a fire, explosions, or poisonous substance leakages. Conducting drills is vital for such emergencies. But they are also important for the safety issues you might deem minor, such as spills. According to safety experts, regular practice enforces safe habits and helps improve reaction times.
Drills can include having your employees enact what to do when a hazard presents itself. They could also aid you and your team in assigning roles in the event of a hazard, as well as determining timelines for addressing the dangers. When done repeatedly over a long time, the reaction comes naturally even in real-life situations. This can significantly reduce the chances of an accident in the workplace.
3. Encourage Reporting of Safety Issues
Reporting dangerous work environments can be a great way of making changes that can help prevent potential danger. Unfortunately, workers who have a history of working in toxic work environments may not be willing to come forward even when they identify a workplace hazard for fear they will get in trouble.
That’s why employers need to actively encourage their employees to report potential safety issues. Employers must assure their employees that they cannot get in trouble for reporting their safety concerns.
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For instance, if a fellow employee shows up to work while intoxicated, other employees should have an avenue of reporting without fear of their reporting leaking out. They must have no fear of retaliation. If employees can trust their employers in handling or looking into their safety concerns, they will be more likely to come forward in the future.
4. Conduct Safety Audits
Having done everything right to ensure that your premises are safe for employees and customers, it would be great to conduct a safety audit. Audits help evaluate the success of an organization’s safety and health programs and identify the areas that could use some improvement.
Big organizations have an in-house health and safety department responsible for performing health and safety audits. However, most smaller businesses prefer to have a set of outside eyes performing audits. This can minimize the possibility of bias in their reporting.
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