Workplace Safety: What You Need to Know as a Business Owner

As a business owner, you’re going to have a lot going on in your mind. You have countless areas to manager. Countless managers to manage. Countless projects to oversee. It’s not all too surprising that a lot of different areas can get pushed to the side, brushed under the carpet or simply forgotten. But if there’s one area that really will require your consistent and ongoing attention over time, it’s health and safety within your business. When you take on staff, or when you start welcoming members of the public into your premises, you become responsible for their health and safety while completing tasks for you or spending time within your offices, stores, warehouses, factories and other spaces that might play a role in your business and its success. But what do you need to focus on to make sure that everything ticks over smoothly? Here are some examples to get you started.

Commercial Premises

First, you need to make sure that your commercial premises are safe. There are so many different things to focus on here that sometimes it can be easier to have a proper check carried out by professionals. You will then receive a detailed report on what needs to be changed, added, improved or other actions that you may need to take. This could range from ensuring that there are sufficient emergency exits to adding a metal roof deck for safe access to the roof of your premises. Ensuring that your premises is up to standard can help to avoid a whole host of serious accidents in the workplace, protecting you and your team.

Operations

There is, of course, risk entailed in many workplace activities that you will ask your staff to undertake. This is where risk assessments come into play. You need to make sure that you undertake risk assessments on a range of different activities that your team complete, so that you can avoid potential hazards where possible and so that your staff are aware of the potential hazards that they face should they be unavoidable. You also need to make sure that your team have the right PPE, or “personal protective equipment”, for any tasks that you ask them to undertake.

Training

Remember that training will be required for safe operations in some areas of your business. Health and safety training is one of the key components of staff training that raises awareness of potential issues and shows staff how to face or deal with them. You will likely bring in third parties to help with this, or have an in-house specialist if you have a large company with a large number of staff. Remember that training is an ongoing and constantly evolving thing. It’s not a one time task that you then don’t have to think about again.

Workplace safety really does need to feature at the top of your list of priorities. Sure, it may not be the most fun or profit driven element of your business. But it is essential and is what, at the end of the day, keeps your team safe and well.