5 Ways to Improve Workplace Safety and Health Standards in Your Company
- Written by Lauren Wiseman
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to prevail around the world, business leaders need to adopt new practices, solutions, and measures to ensure the health and safety of their workforce. Mind you, this is not just about the health of the individual, it’s also about improving business productivity and continuity, and ensuring success in 2021 and beyond. After all, without a healthy employee collective, you won’t have the necessary human-power to drive mission-critical projects and achieve your goals in the trying months to come.
Now, while preventing a pandemic-induced, business-busting disaster should be your top priority, it’s also important that you focus on the physical safety of your employees. Workplace safety and health are the two sides of the same coin, and today we’ll be talking about the best solutions to maximize both to emerge from COVID as a winner. Here are the five ways you can improve the safety and health standards in your organization.
Start by identifying health and safety risks
To start, you need to be aware of all the potential health and safety risks in your company, both internal and external, and how they can affect your organization as a whole. You can only create effective solutions by acting on relevant and meaningful data and insights, so your first order of business is to do some research, conduct interviews with department heads and employees, and create a comprehensive risk analysis.
It might sound like a lot of work, but now is the time to set this foundation of safety and health in order to effectuate the right strategies in the months to come. What’s more, this is the only way to prioritize the solutions and their implementation, because you can’t expect to fix everything at once. Work closely with the leaders in your organization to create a comprehensive list and the potential solutions for each risk.
Ensure safety through proper training and education
Your health and safety policies can only do so much to keep your employees safe and happy. If you want people to follow your guidelines, adhere to the COVID-prevention measures, and ensure their safety and the safety of others, then you need to provide proper training, education, and continuous guidance. You can start by having your department heads explain the new rules and procedures, and continue with short but personalized workshops to ensure the employees are internalizing the new measures.
That said, you can’t leave it at that, because given enough time, people will start falling back into their old ways. This needlessly increases risk, so it’s important to follow up with the individual, see how they’re doing, and use the opportunity to help them embrace the new health and safety standards.
Test for COVID regularly and provide medical support
Of course, you can’t expect your employees to do everything themselves, nor should you take any chances by allowing them to go in and out of the office without proper and regular testing. Now more than ever before, it is important to test for COVID-19 symptoms every day, and to provide your employees with the right hygiene products around the office like hand sanitizers and masks.
Even more importantly, you have to make sure that the medical professionals conducting the tests are certified, and that you have ACLS certified experts on standby to administer immediate treatment to severe COVID cases. Given the fact that COVID-19 can be particularly dangerous for people suffering from cardio-pulmonary conditions, it is important to respond to emergencies quickly in order to save lives.
Leave nothing to chance and label everything
When it comes to safety in the workplace, you can leave nothing to chance. Properly marking and labeling everything around the office, facility, construction site or warehouse is paramount to employee safety, but it’s also the only way to minimize liability for your company. This can be one of the most common business problems that you can easily fix with preemptive action.
If you haven’t already, you need to start marking all potential hazards in the workplace so that everyone is aware of every hazard throughout the site. Make sure to walk everyone through the workplace to point to all safety markers, and send out a detailed memo listing each and every one. Install security cameras around the workspace so that you or the employee always have visual proof in case of an accident.
Enable and encourage employees to safeguard their health
Finally, don’t forget to nurture your employees’ health this year through quality of life improvements in the workplace, but also by supporting their physical and mental health. Keep in mind that your employees are probably suffering from COVID-induced stress and anxiety at work, so it’s important to implement employee wellness programs.
This includes talking to the individual about the problems, mindset, goals and needs, but also to support their health by inspiring them to be more physically active. You can also introduce healthier food options in the cafeteria to support their general well-being.
Wrapping up
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many uncertainties to the business world, so now’s the time to implement the right measures in order to stay afloat. Implement these tips to ensure the safety and health of your employee collective in 2021 and beyond.
