3 ways to keep your employees safe at work

Image credit: Standsome Worklifestyle

When you are an employer, you have a lot of responsibilities toward your employees. You need to make sure they have all the right equipment, for example, and that they understand the training that you are offering. You need to ensure that they are representing your business in the way you want them to. Plus, you need to keep them safe at work; everyone has the right to have a safe day of work and go home at the end of it. Read on to find out how this can be done.

Assess the environment
In order to understand the risks that might be present, you need to carry out a risk assessment within your workplace. This includes all the warehouse areas and yards as well as office spaces and vehicles. 

To do this, you should literally walk around the business with a notepad and pen, making notes of anything that could cause an accident or be dangerous in some way. This might be loose cabling, vehicles with keys left in them, piles of paper stacked up near a doorway, a blocked-up fire exit, or a door that doesn’t lock properly. Make notes of all of this and then fix each issue as quickly as possible to ensure that the working environment is safe. 

If you have a lot of machinery, this job can become more difficult; you may need machinery-specific risk assessment training from ST&L to help you understand how to do the work properly, and this is very important. 

Get expert advice 
Just because you are the boss that doesn’t mean you automatically know how to keep your employees safe. You will have some idea of how it will work and of what you should do, but you might not have all the information you need or know quite how to implement your ideas. This is why asking for advice is a great idea. 

You can speak to a business mentor if you have one. They will have been in this situation, and they will know what it takes to keep your employees safe; listen to what they have to say and implement what you can. If you don’t have a mentor, there are other places to go for advice. You might try an online forum, for example, where employees can ask for and give advice. Or search online to get some ideas of what you can do to help. 

If you’re not sure about something, ask. You can’t be an effective leader if you don’t have the answers yourself.

Create a welcoming work environment 
Finally, it’s not just about ‘being’ safe that is important (although this is, of course, vital); it is also about ‘feeling’ safe. When you create a welcoming work environment, that sense of safety and comfort will follow, making your employees happy to be working for you, and much more productive too. 

To do this, you need to provide them with everything they need to do their job and ensure they are comfortable – ergonomic furniture, plenty of breaks, natural light, the right temperature, and a separate break room for snacks and time out are all important.