5 Steps You Must Take to Ensure Your Employees’ Safety

As an employer, you have an obligation to your staff and employees to ensure their safety whilst they are at work. There are certain things that are out of your hands and are the responsibility of the individual but for the most part you have a duty of care towards anyone you employ.

There are copious amounts of steps that’s an employer must follow to ensure the safety of their employees, here are just five that are possibly the most important.

Inspect your workplace

In order to identify any potential hazards in the workplace, you must inspect the building thoroughly. Without this you are unable to eliminate the hazards or minimize the risk to your employees. This isn’t something that can be done once and then forgotten about, this must be done on a regular basis to identify any new hazards and potentially stop or minimize them before any accident was to happen.

Train your employees

One of the best and most important ways to ensure the safety of your employees is to ensure that they are fully trained and know what to do if an accident was to occur. Each individual department would need first aiders and fire marshals who have been trained to help others in the event of an accident.

How many people you would need to have trained would depending entirely on the size of your business and total number of people you employ. Training up just a handful of employees could be the difference between life and death in some circumstances and is not something that should be over looked.

Refresh

Following on from my lost point, training for first aiders and fire wardens should be refreshed regularly to ensure all training is up to date should there be any changes. Regular fire drills will keep things fresh in their mind, so they remember what to do and where to go should a fire happen.

Keep records

An accident record book should always be kept on site and updated whenever an accident occurs whilst an employee is working. Even something that seems like a small accident should always be recorded in the accident book. The reason that this is so important is that if the same accident is occurring again and again, there is a record of this and the cause of the accident can be investigated accordingly.

Another reason why keeping a record is so important is in case the employee makes a workplace accident claim. Having a record of exactly what happened will back their case in the courts but also help the business if the employee tries to exaggerate what happened.

Investigate incidents

This was partially touched on in my previous point but every single incident that happens on site should be investigated thoroughly. Investigating each accident will help find the root cause of the accident, whether it is something that the business would need to change or just carelessness from the employee. After all, accidents do happen and sometimes nobody is at fault, it’s just clumsiness.

If there is a certain accident that keeps on happening again and again it may be time to make some changes. Maybe a glass door needs a sticker to make people aware it’s there or you may need to have a ‘mind the step’ sign out up.

Little things like this could make a big difference to the amount of accidents happening in your workplace, you just need to keep a track of them.

In Conclusion

Now, there are many more steps that employers must take to fulfil their obligation towards their employees, these however in my opinion are imperative.

If an employer is negligent in their duty of care towards employees the results could be drastic, not only for themselves but also the injured party.

The number of people now making compensation claims for workplace accidents is increasing year on year as employers are becoming more careless with their safety regulations.