Accident Prevention at Work
In 2019, almost three out of every 100 workers were injured in workplace accidents.
Although many of these accidents and injuries come from construction work — and other primarily physical jobs — even an office can be a dangerous environment.
Accident prevention is an issue that should be taken extremely seriously in any workplace.
Whatever environment you work in, you should be taking great care to minimize the risk of workplace injuries and ensure your employees have safety measures in place.
It's not just important for the welfare and reputation of the company, but for the health and happiness of the employees.
Fortunately, there are many ways to keep the risk of work injuries at a minimum.
1. Equip Employees With Preventative Equipment
It may be important to equip employees with equipment to help prevent accidents, such as steel-toed shoes, goggles, etc.
If in an office environment, wrist rests for keyboards can be good prevention for repetitive strain injury.
Often, something small can make all the difference.
2. Provide Training and Education for Accident Prevention
It's important to educate both employees and management to prevent anyone from having an accident at their workplace.
HSE training can be a great way to do this. Health, Safety, and Environmental training is thorough and helpful and is the best way to keep everyone alert and aware.
3. Don't Overwork Staff Unnecessarily
Exhausted staff means easy mistakes. Sometimes, it may affect their performance. Sometimes, it may even put them at risk.
Employ more staff when they're needed, and be understanding of the needs of the employees in a workplace. Too much overtime is not a good thing, even if employees claim to be fine with it.
4. Keep Reviewing Your Policies
Whatever policies are implemented with the aim of preventing injury, it's important to keep reviewing them.
Sometimes, policies implemented one year may not be applicable to the next— or something else may be useful, or education might bring to light a required update.
It's always good to keep examining and improving.
5. Carry out Regular Checks
As well as reviewing policies, it's important to carry out checks of the actual workplace.
Hazards can appear in any environment and would often go unnoticed in day-to-day life. Carrying out regular checks means that the organization's employees will be confident management is on top of everything, and feel safe in their hands.
Even if everything looks fine at a quick glance, nothing is more important than being thorough.
As Always, Keep Improving!
Accident prevention is often judged as common sense but often, it's not. People need to be educated in exactly what the risks to them in their workplace are, and that means constant learning for both management and their employees.
As long as you're constantly willing to improve and keep reviewing your policies and the environment around you, the organization's workplace will be a safe one.
That's unspeakably important to improve the lives of employees and their performance.
For more life tips, check out the rest of our blog!