There are many ‘good enough’ considerations you may wish to apply when it comes to managing your business. For instance, a restaurant kitchen will often run with a ‘wastage sheet’ they keep track of. This means that any inventory they must dispose of during that day, such as a meal being dropped on the floor, or ingredients that are unusable despite being within their expiration date, will be marked as an acceptable loss. Often, these acceptable losses and tolerable risks are known as the cost of doing business, and we must plan for them.
That said, there are some considerations in which ‘tolerable risk’ is never something that can be accepted, even if it is something that may be understood as an unwanted possibility. For instance, we must never accept a data leak of our client’s financial information, which means we must continually invest in cybersecurity measures and work with the best it security consulting services to ensure our network is as protected as it could ever possibly be.
The same goes for staff and visitor safety. We must invest all we can to ensure this hits a 0% record, year on year, no matter what. There are no ‘acceptable injuries’ that take place here. In this post, we’ll discuss why that is, and a few measures to achieve it:
Signage
Essential signage can save lives. For instance, telling staff to wear protective equipment past a certain point, warning about electrical boxes in the area, or, of course, easily showcasing the fire escape routes (visit this site to see examples) no matter where someone is within your business is essential.
The signage should be clear, totally visible from many sight angles, and appropriate to the situation. It’s also important to make sure health and safety reviews take place each year to make sure staff understand what those signs mean and how their placement might be changing as you develop and renovate parts of your office.
Visibility
It’s important to make sure our offices are properly illuminated, in more ways than one. Of course, we have the obvious need for a business building to be well lit so that people can find their way around, so that trip hazards are noticed ahead of time (before they are removed, which should be immediate), and that they can adequately keep up with the safety standards expected of them.
But another lighting can serve more of a direct purpose, such as emergency lighting for the workplace. This latter option can help your staff navigate out of your building in the midst of an emergency without having to navigate or find it difficult to take the most efficient path there.
Instructions
While we may train our staff in health and safety standards on a regular basis, it’s best to make safety as foolproof as possible. For instance, sign instructions that show someone how to operate equipment, the exact button to hit when an emergency stop is required, and what practices to avoid can be essential.
At the very least, this prevents any staff member from having an excuse when it comes to managing their day-to-day safety practice. This way, you can make sure that accountability is raised, and that even the newest hire is totally informed regarding your safety strategy. It might even be that warm recommendation, such as encouraging your staff to set their lumbar support position correctly on the ergonomic office furniture you have invested in can make a massive difference going forward, for all the right reasons.
Training
Training is an essential component of keeping proper safety necessities at the forefront of our minds. Even health and safety staff responsible for the upkeep of these measures can forget every single piece of advisable practice when trying to manage a large building, in the same way, that over time, we can begin to forget the minor details involved with our driving theory road knowledge.
For this reason, brushing up on this necessity, continuously, is essential. Schedule regular training seminars that allow staff to come forward and reinforce concepts again and again, to the point where they become second nature. Perhaps the chief of all these is how to operate in an emergency fire, how to report safety problems, how to spot safety issues in an office environment (such as trip hazards, loose drinks, overloaded electrical sockets, etc). Another important area to have refresher training is the correct use of safety equipment, such as how to correctly wear military hazmat suits or put on an oxygen mask. This way, staff have no excuse when practicing anything less than essential safety practices.
Equipment
Safety equipment, or equipment that abets safety, is an essential investment. Proper safety gear to wear and protect your staff from a range of unsafe exposures, such as exposure to chemicals, bright lights, or other manufacturing sensibilities is key. In some cases, the safety equipment may refer to the high-visibility jackets worn in your warehouse, especially when operating machinery. Safety equipment can also be defined as trolleys that allow staff to pick up heavy materials without having to use their back or legs to haul them, or STOREMASTA hazardous goods containers that can be used to safely store dangerous chemicals or flammable liquids at the workplace.
But even in an office environment, safety equipment can come into play. For instance, you may invest in mechanical keyboards that allow for proper comfort typing, allowing staff to write all day without forming risk of repetitive strain injury.
Accountability
At the end of the day, safety is only properly practiced when negligence or wilful dismissal of correct procedure is punished. Enforcement of accountability is essential in making sure we understand who is at fault for a problem happening, why they were at fault, how the problem took place, why the problem took place if the problem could have been avoided, and where the buck stops.
Ultimately, it’s essential to make sure you come to the right conclusions so that you don’t end up blaming someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, accidents are possible too, and a clean accountability process is there to protect those who didn’t contribute to a problem. Without a good review process, however, you will always fly blind and never be fully sure if a safety issue could have been avoided.
With this advice, we hope you can see how perfect work safety is a necessary goal, and how to achieve it.
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