Your Health and Safety Programs Checklist for the New Year
Which of your health and safety programs need updating?
Your health and safety programs need to be upgraded as your business changes and grows. Regulations don’t stay the same and neither do industry practices, so why wouldn’t you need to adjust the ways in which you keep your employees prepared? In order to prevent accidents and injuries, as well as cut your expenses, make sure to do the following in the New Year:
Bring In a Fresh Set of Eyes
Every work site has its hazards. Businesses in the same industry tend to share the same specialized risks, regardless of where they’re located. Hiring a health and safety expert with experience in your line of work can help detect problems before they cause catastrophes. The right service can send someone to your job site to look around, and after a thorough analysis, you receive a report detailing all the apparent dangers and how to best deal with them. Depending on how much help you require, this step can be more or less invasive. However, it’s important to note that an in-depth risk assessment and reduction plan can have a marked impact on your insurance premiums.
Revise Your Safety Guidelines
Business owners aren’t always the best writers, and sometimes the staff you have in place isn’t qualified to create clear safety guidelines. It’s important to work with someone who knows about safety rules and regulations in your industry, including any recent changes. However, according to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, or OSHA, you can’t just focus on specialized problems. Health and safety plans must address a wide range of solutions for health and safety risks. These include:
- Natural disasters
- Explosions
- Toxic spills
- Workplace violence
- Terrorist attacks, and
- Communicable diseases
It’s imperative that you’re prepared to act the moment you know there’s a problem. Failing to do so can leave your employees in harm’s way and make your business vulnerable to fines and lawsuits.
Create Effective Training Materials
What constitutes an effective emergency plan? What information is needed and how is it best made available? You can’t protect workers without a safety plan that’s easy to understand and put into action. Unfortunately, many safety training materials are created with information instead of action in mind. The reasons steps are taken are spelled out in black and white, while the actual steps workers are expected to take are vaguely outlined. A safety specialist can formulate a concrete plan and spell out the details so that anyone on any level of company management can pick up a manual and know exactly what they should be doing in a given emergency. This helps keep order during a chaotic time, and it helps cut down on injuries, which in turn lowers your potential liabilities when trouble strikes.
Ensure Regulations are Met and Maintained
Depending upon the industry you’re in and the materials you use, your safety program may be heavily impacted by OSHA regulations. It’s imperative that you take the guidelines seriously, as fines can be significant enough to topple a company. Work with a professional capable of helping you include these points into any safety program you devise, down to purchasing and maintaining appropriate safety equipment and establishing regular training programs for new and existing staff.
Discover how updated health and safety programs can improve your employer brand and save your company money. Call 770-962-1700 or click to talk with the experts at Einstein HR today.
