When it comes to health and safety procedures, it is the responsibility of the manager to ensure that employees are working in the safest environment possible to avoid accidents and injury. However, sometimes managers have been known to make mistakes.
Of course, managers are human and they are not totally flawless individuals. They are capable of making mistakes even on something as important as health and safety procedures. It is important that as a workplace leader, you are aware of these potential mistakes so that you can do your best to avoid them and create the safest working environment possible for your employees.
Are you guilty of making any of these errors when it comes to health and safety procedures?
Not Setting a Good Example
When you are trying to encourage your employees to follow health and safety procedures, it is crucial that you walk the talk and practice what you preach. Your employees will follow your actions rather than your words and if you are not upholding proper health and safety regulations you will be sending the message that they are not important. All of the slogans and posters will not make a difference if your employees see you disregarding the rules, so make sure that you are always following the correct health and safety procedures in the workplace.
Cutting Corners
It can be very tempting to cut corners sometimes when it comes to health and safety procedures, especially when doing the things the proper way works out to be more expensive and time consuming. However, it is never a good idea to compromise the safety of your employees just to get things done quicker or save a bit of money. If an accident occurs it could result in an injury that causes an expensive legal battle. Or even worse, the accident could result in loss of life, something that is priceless.
Providing Unsafe Equipment
Many health and safety incidents result from employees having to work with out of date, inadequate or damaged equipment. Perhaps you are trying to reduce costs by avoiding replacing equipment until totally necessary, but you could be putting your employees in danger.
It is important to make sure that your workers have the best and safest equipment that is required to do their job without risk of injury, so if your equipment needs replacing it should be done as soon as possible.
Having the Wrong Attitude
Remember, you are not following health and safety procedures to avoid legislation or to make an inspection, you are ensuring that your valuable employees are not in danger while they are doing their job. Think about their lives, their family and their community and how much impact a serious accident or fatality would have.
When managers see health and safety procedures as an annoyance that they must comply to, they might not take them seriously and tend to fall back on bad habits as soon as the inspector disappears. Never forget that it is the life and limb of real human beings that is on the line, not just passing an inspection.
As an employer you are responsible for the health and safety of your workers, so make sure that you make health and safety procedures a priority and avoid these common mistakes to create the safest working environment possible. An excellent health and safety training course which teaches the role and responsibilities of a responsible person in the workplace is the NEBOSH General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety.
Are you guilty of making these common mistakes when it comes to health and safety procedures? These errors should be avoided to keep employees safe.