1. Improve your workplace safety culture
My top tip for you is to make improvements to the safety culture in your workplace.
This is something that you can easily do without having to spend any money. It mainly involves ensuring that everyone in your workplace is on the same page. It is important for your employees to know that you are committed to safety and that their safety is something you really care about.
Ensure that everybody is comfortable discussing safety and talk about it frequently. You need to ensure that your employees feel safe. That will improve the safety culture in your workplace when they feel comfortable telling you when they are not feeling safe.
2. Avoid worker fatigue
This will help to prevent injuries in the future that are avoidable as long as employees have a good awareness of what is happening around them. There really isn’t much you can do about sleep-related fatigue unless your employees are being overworked. However, most fatigue is caused by stress.
Ensure your employees are not feeling stressed out! When you have good safety culture in your workplace, it should allow employees to feel free to tell you when they are feeling stressed and what can be done to make the situation better.
3. Hazard communication
Make sure you know about any hazards that your workplace has and remain aware at all times of your surroundings. When you know about any hazards that may be in your workplace it can help you avoid them. For instance, if you are aware that there are trip hazards like cords in a certain area then you will pay close attention to these details.
Also, ensure that employees feel comfortable letting each other know when an area has hazards in it that other employees might not be aware of. If you know about any hazards in an area then you can be sure other employees also know about them.
4. Take breaks and move around
Be sure that your employees (especially office workers) take breaks and move around. It is not good to remain immobile or in a hunched position for a long time. That can also lead to fatigue.
5. Maintain good posture
Make sure you pay close attention to your workplace ergonomics, particularly when picking things up and performing other types of manual labor. That might seem tedious and frustrating, but in the future, it can help to prevent injuries from unexpectedly occurring.
6. Make sure everyone wears PPE
This is fairly straightforward and comes back to your safety culture. if you have good safety culture then a majority of your employees will be aware that they need to wear personal protective equipment.
Your employees should feel comfortable calling out co-workers who are not wearing PPE to remind them that they need to wear it.
When the proper PPE is worn it can mean the difference between a serious injury and a near miss.
7. Use machines and tools correctly
Make sure that your employees use industrial equipment and tools correctly.
If you don’t have the handbooks and manuals for your equipment make sure your employees are taught how to properly use equipment such as lock-n-lift in ways that will not harm them. That includes things such as JSA’s and lockout Tagouts to ensure all of your employees are working from the same page.
8. Be aware at all times of emergency plans and exits
Employees need to be made aware of what your emergency action plans and emergency exits are. You don’t want to end up in a situation where something awful occurs and employees don’t know what they should do.
You need to ensure they know what they should do, and what your company’s current emergency process is, and also ensure that you continue to improve your plans.
