Injuries
to employees can be devastating for businesses, especially small businesses,
with fewer employees available to take on new roles when an injured worker.
While workers compensation insurance will help pay medical costs and replace
and injured employees lost income. Your business will have to absorb costs
associated with reduced productivity, overtime, training and replacements.
Therefore, workplace injuries and illnesses can be costly for employers. Some
of those costs are more clear, but less obvious costs can add up, too.
The best
way to decrease the hidden costs of workplace injuries is to prevent accidents
from happening in the first place. Following the steps below and consider
creating a formal, comprehensive workplace safety program to help reduce the
injuries at your workplace. Here are some tips on what your business can do to
improve workplace safety today.
- Engage management and employees
A business is most successful in improving workplace safety when leadership and
employees work together. The responsibility for workplace safety should be part
of everyone’s job, and specific employees and managers should haven specific
responsibility and tasks. Such as being tasked with implanting, maintaining and
improving workplace safety program components.
- Analyse your workplace and
operations
Evaluate your business and workplace from top to bottom. Review and look over
your equipment as well as the activities going on in your workplace. As part of
your evaluation, communicate with your employees to learn their safety
concerns. Whenever you add new operations, equipment’s, activities or
facilities to your workplace, analyse and evaluate these for risks as well.
- Alleviate hazards
It is not only vital to identify and be aware of hazards and risky activities,
practices, equipment and infrastructure. When hazards are identified, you
should remove or make sure you control them by replacing or fixing equipment.
As well as adding new safety measures or changing the operations at the
workplace.
- Implementing
training
You should include workplace safety training as part of employees onboarding
journey and also offer a memory refresh of the training on a regular basis to
prevent hazards. Additionally, to prevent injury, you may want to include
first-aid training so that your employees can respond effectively if an
accident would occur.
- Evaluate, respond, act and improve.
Promoting workplace safety is a continuous process and should be continuously
done through evaluation. As a business, you should review and improve your
safety program, especially in response to accidents or if one almost happened.
Employees need to be encouraged to report hazards and evaluate safety steps.
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