How to Keep Your Team Safe

As a business leader it's your duty to ensure that the people in your employ are safe and healthy while they are on the job. Failing to do this can very much kill your business, with large expenses and medical bills, frustratingly long lawsuits, a depletion of trust and very low productivity. 

When you have health and safety consultancy services as part of your business model, you are actively making a point of ensuring that your business is safe for everybody involved. Workplace injury rates have been on the decline since 1972, but slips, trips, overexertion and falls are still happening. Understanding that you need to have the right health and safety policies in place if you are working in a dangerous industry is one thing, but here are some of the best ways that you can keep your employees safe on the job.

• Invest properly in training. You shouldn't assume that your employees will know what to do in the event of an emergency. If you have an office or a warehouse for example, you need to ensure that your employees are trained on the exit points, how to call an emergency service, where they can pull the fire alarm and which fire escapes to use. You should also not assume that they're going to take the time to read a 75 page health and safety manual. Instead, you should make sure that you are investing in training classes and video based training to help everybody be on board on how to act safely in the office.
   
• Get to know excellent occupational therapists. Having links to occupational therapists is just intelligent if you are worried about things like back and neck pain, muscle strains, wrist injuries and more. Workplace ergonomics are a big deal, and there are plenty of good guides out there to help you with proper workplace ergonomics in general.
   
• Implement signs and labels all over the place. Your workplace should be clearly signposted when it comes to health and safety. If there are specifically loud machines that require air protection when they are operated, or there are certain areas that are slick when wet, people need to know. Signs and labels will help you to inexpensively communicate important information to everybody working on the floor.
   
• Keep your workplace clean. If you want to minimize your risks of trips and falls, then you need to invest in a great cleaning company who will be able to help you with that. The right cleaning company will ensure that everything in your business is compliant with health and safety. You can ensure that the areas that need to be sanitized have been sanitized, and you could ensure that there is nothing to trip over because the cleaners will have put it all away.

Keeping your employees safe is just a smart way to avoid a lawsuit. Speak with your HR department, your legal team and with your health and safety officer in the workplace and make sure that everybody feels safe when they come to work.