As a business leader it is so important that you can create a safe and healthy environment for your people. It’s going to help to lead your organization towards business success, and it’s going to keep your staff retention rates exactly where they should be. You do not need to have people leaving your business all of the time because they don’t feel safe when they go to work.
Because you are an employer, it’s up to you to take time to ensure that your workers are always feeling safe and implement the correct safety policies to do so. Of course employees need to take responsibility for their own safety, but you putting them first by making sure they’re all visitors and clients wear name badges, by making sure that there is a sign in sheet and having CCTV around the place is just the beginning. Knowing how to identify an unsafe environment and situations in your workplace is so important and you need to allow your employees space to speak up about it if they don’t feel safe too. This will help you to identify any potential opportunities for improvement. With that in mind, let’s look at the ways that you can keep your employees safe in the workplace.
- Talk openly about safety issues. One of the best ways that you can keep your employees safe in the office is by sharing any concerns that you may have about safety. There are certain things that may not seem unsafe to everybody, but these are the things that can often end up overlooked. When these things are overlooked and forgotten, people end up feeling unsafe. You’re not doing a bad thing by reporting something hazardous, and you’re not doing a bad thing by making sure that you are speaking up if you spot something unsafe in practice. If you are openly discussing it with your employees, it feels like a team effort for the office to be a safer place.
- Listen to the women. Of course you need to listen to the men and how they feel about safety, but you do need to pay attention to what the women in your office are telling you. If your stairwells are not covered by CCTV or well lit in the building, this needs to be changed immediately. Parking garages and parking lots need to be well lit and they need to be covered by security. Whether you have a security guard on site or you have responsive lighting, it’s up to you. It’s so important that you listen to the women in the office because they will tell you whether or not they feel safe or unsafe on the premises. You need everybody feeling safe, and you’ll find that statistically, women will often feel less safer than men.
- Make sure that everybody understands security procedures. Even if this is only your first time visiting the office because everybody works from home, you have to understand the security procedures and emergency procedures in the building. These things won’t always be given in front of your face, so ask questions to the building owners and be curious. Making sure that you understand it all is not something that you should be ashamed of.If you are an employer and you are bringing new people on board, then you need to have a solid onboarding process where safety is discussed. You don’t have to have hazardous materials on site for your business to be unsafe. So make sure that you are training everybody as soon as they come into the business.
- Secure all of the workstations. Every single worker who decides to work in the office should feel secure at their desk. There should be padlocks for their cabinets and their desk drawers and everybody should have autonomy over those codes that they put in. The workstation should be the individual responsibility of each worker. It’s the area that they work on coming up with their plans and solutions for each of their departments. If the workstation is unsafe, Then there is a problem that needs to be addressed. The workstations should be kept clean and the IT team should be briefing everybody on what it means to stay safe on the Internet while they are at work. This should be a non negotiable in your business and everybody should be aware of any particular consequences that you may have in place.
- Make sure that everybody understands ergonomics. If you have desk workers on the job, then you need to be making sure that they are aware of how to sit themselves so that they are not putting their bodies in any danger just by coming to work. Sitting up straight with the correct posture is one thing, but they need to really understand what it means to be safe at their desks. You don’t want anybody dealing with long term injuries, nor do you want to have to deal with workers compensation claims because of repetitive strain injury where you haven’t done the appropriate risk assessment or ordered the appropriate furniture that they need to work correctly. People should be able to type and feel safe at their desks without worrying about their wrists not working the way that they should, or ending up at the doctor’s office with a bandage around their arm.
- Implement A tidy desk policy. When you have everybody coming into the office, it’s important that you have a policy where desks are cleaned down at the end of the day. It’s absolutely fine to still have an outsourced cleaning company come in to clean the office every day, but you need everybody to take responsibility for their own workspaces. Tidy areas and organized workspaces actually help us to work better for longer. We feel way more productive with our jobs and we feel like we are able to achieve more as a result. It’s scientifically proven that our brains work a lot better when there is less clutter around. It’s vital, then, that you make sure that you are speaking to your team on a regular basis about this desk tidying policy. Make sure that everybody feels supported within it and answer any questions as necessary.
- Don’t skip out on tools and machinery training. It’s your job as an employer to make sure that everybody knows how to use the tools in place in a manufacturing or in a factory setting. Even in a regular office, everybody needs to know how to use the computers, the photocopiers and any machinery involved. Training is vital for these things because the more we know and the more everybody else knows, the safer the office can be.
- Don’t forget to designate first aid. You should have one or two of your workers in every department who understand what to do in the event of an accident or a fire. Having somebody in charge of safety is going to make your office much safer as a place to work overall. A safety officer in your building should be in charge of the accident book, but you should make sure that they have their first aid certifications. Often this will mean sending people out to training on your business dime. This is actually a positive way to spend your money in your business because then you can be sure that there is somebody on site who knows how to deal with injuries and accidents as they occur. If you also make sure that you Delegate accidents and disasters to somebody, in the event of a fire or a flood or a tornado or a terrorist attack, people in your office will know what to do. Safety first is an absolute must.
- Make sure that everybody is taking regular breaks. It’s all about productivity in an office, sure, but you also want to make sure that the people working for you feel like they can take breaks and have a breather from time to time. It’s vital that you are sending people on their breaks and you are sticking to it. Not only do you want to make sure that you are an employer that people know care about them, but you want to ensure that when people come into the business they feel like they are allowed to take their breaks and rest or during the working day.
- Make visitors known. Name badges are one way to do this, as we mentioned earlier, but you need to have key cards and have a signature sheet at the front of your business so that you know who comes and goes. This isn’t just because you need to know who’s in your business at any given time, but for safety purposes in case of an accident or emergency on the site at the time a visitor is there. When you ensure you know who is on your premises at all times, you’ll be able to keep up with any issues that occur. And if there is a theft in the building at any time, you can be on hand for the police.
