Being a health and safety professional is a tough job. Although their safety directly affects your employees, they don’t always give it much thought and it can fall by the wayside when they’re going about their daily tasks. It’s sometimes difficult to get them to follow the workplace safety measures you’ve put in place to try and keep them safe.
The more they follow these measures, the more likely they are to remain safe. But despite this, unless you enforce the practices, many safety techniques you establish fall through the cracks. In order to provide the required protection for employees effectively, safety professionals need to prioritize best practice based on its importance. If nothing else, you should be certain that your employees are following the essential safety practices.
Make the management aware of any potential hazards
Whilst those responsible for employee safety may be trained to identify and alleviate risks, they often have a limited knowledge of certain workplace hazards. Many hazards aren’t apparent unless you come across them whilst carrying out your duties. Your employees will generally know more than you will about the types of things they run into whilst working and because of this they ought to play an integral role in indentifying and alleviating risks. Your employees should be trained to actively seek out risks and report them to management using the correct procedures.
Be sure to take scheduled breaks
Fatigue often results in slower reactions, a reduced ability to process information, memory lapses, absent-mindedness, decreased awareness, lack of attention, underestimation of risk and reduced coordination. It’s absolutely essential that your employees take their regularly scheduled breaks to avoid fatigue setting in. This will not only help to avoid exhaustion and associated injuries, but it will also reduce stress. Stress can often be a contributing factor to incidents of workplace violence, so any opportunity to lower the stress levels of your employees should definitely be taken.
Maintain responsibility for your company’s Health and Safety Policy
As the health and safety professional for your company, you are responsible for the Health and Safety and Lone Worker Policies. But these policies also come with responsibilities for your staff. They should all be thoroughly trained on all health and safety matters and updated whenever you need to make a change to your policies. They need to be able to take appropriate action in the event of an emergency because when ever second counts, they should not be waiting for instructions from someone else.
There are a multitude of safety procedures and practices in addition to these, but they are a great place to start. Every single employee across all roles and industries cannot afford to forego these essential practices.
For more information on protecting your lone workers please click here.