Health and Safety at work is incredibly important, not only for legal reasons but also for the health and well-being of your employees. If you are in a managerial role, it is your responsibility to encourage and remind your employees to follow appropriate health and safety procedures. But what is the best way to ensure that this behaviour is encouraged in the workplace?
Here are a few ways that you can encourage safety at work among your employees and create a healthier, safer and happier working environment:
- Communication is very important. Before commencing a job, make sure that you are very clear in expressing what needs to be done and how it should be carried out. This will avoid health and safety mistakes occurring from confusion or mixed messages.
- Put up handy reminders in the form of signs and posters around the workplace, such as next to equipment or in certain areas. If employees are not sure about the safest policy, they can always refer to the poster for guidance.
- Have frequent meetings about safety at work to discuss the specific health and safety aspects of your particular workplace. This is where you can let your employees know about any changes and give them pointers and guidelines.
- Supply your employees with the right current and up to date equipment that they need to do their jobs. Many ‘safety at work’ issues are caused by employees working with old, damaged, outdated or insufficient equipment.
- Be aware of potential hazards in the environment that you are working in. Before you start a job, look around carefully and perform a risk assessment to determine how to avoid these risks.
- Encourage your employees to report any potential health and safety risks to you. If you are not approachable as a manager and your employees don’t feel comfortable reporting these issues to you then a potential serious problem could go unresolved for a long time until it finally causes an accident.
- Make sure that your employees are all trained in current safety at work courses that are relevant to the jobs that they are doing. Give them the support, time off and funding necessary to ensure that they have this training and that it is kept up to date.
- Of course, as a manager you should also keep your health and safety training up to date as well. If your safety qualification needs updating, book that course right away!
- Ensure that your employees are wearing safe clothing and footwear while on the job at all times. If they are not wearing safe gear, provide them with an alternative or send them home to change.
- Keep the workplace clean and well-maintained to avoid any dangers that result from messy and chaotic workplace environments.
- Never take shortcuts. It might be tempting to do a job unsafely because it is much quicker and easier, but this is the leading cause of employee injury. The time that you save by ignoring safety procedures at work is not worth it if you cause a serious injury.
These are just a few things that you can do as an employer to encourage safety at work among your employees and to create a better, safer workplace environment for all of your staff.
Safety at work is very important and it is the responsibility of the employer to encourage safe working procedure among employees.