Workplace Safety And Risk Reduction: A Step-by-Step Guide
It is highly unlikely that you will have absolutely no risk to yourself, your employers, or visitors in your workplace. Even if you operate a simple office, there are still likely to be potential threats and dangers, from trip hazards to scalding water. Yet as a business owner, you need to ensure you understand these problems and that, where practicable, you do something about them. At the very least, you need to minimize the risks and reduce them down to negligible issues.
This sounds as though it would be a highly time-consuming and potentially even difficult job. However, you can do it and ensure your workplace is as safe and risk-free as possible. It simply takes some planning and organization. Read on for a guide on how to get started.
Workplace Safety And Risk Reduction: A Step-by-Step Guide
Identify The Potential Dangers
The first thing you will need to do is carry out a risk assessment to identify potential hazards within your workplace. You will need to look for:
- Biological risks (animals, insects, and bacteria, for example)
- Chemical risks
- Physical safety risks
- Psychosocial risks (these link to threats to mental health and wellbeing)
To do this risk assessment work, take a notepad and pen and walk around your workplace. Look at everything and ascertain whether it could be a risk or not. If you’re not sure, it’s best to note it down as it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to health and safety.
Carry Out Regular Training
The more training your team has, the safer they will be. This can be generalized health and safety training – this is actually very important – but it should also be specific training relating to their job. If someone has to use a particular piece of equipment, such as a plastic welding rod, they will need to know exactly how to use it in the safest way, for example.
Training is not something you can offer once and then tick a box to say you’ve done it. In reality, rules and laws change all the time, and equipment gets updated. That means that training has to be done on a regular basis. This will keep everyone up to date, and it will also refresh people’s memories even if nothing has actually changed.
Provide PPE
Even with excellent training, some tasks will still have potential hazards attached to them. Take the welding example above; the work can get very hot, and metallic sparks fly when someone is welding. These can lead to dangerous issues if not handled correctly. That’s why you need to provide your workers with PPE – personal protective equipment.
It is your duty as an employer to provide these items, which might include hard hats, welding helmets, ear defenders, protective goggles, and so on, and to ensure your workers have training in how to use the equipment. You should also create a clause in everyone’s contract so that they have to wear the equipment when working. In this way, although you can’t eliminate the risk, you are reducing it drastically by making your workers much safer.
