Health and safety in the workplace is important in all industries
. All businesses and companies, no matter what industry you may be in, should have the appropriate workplace occupational health and safety measures and procedures in place, even if your employees don't work with heavy machinery. Physical work as simple as lifting and unpacking boxes can be potentially dangerous if your employees don't have a procedure to work with.
At the end of the day, the responsibility to promote workplace safety lies in the hands of employers. Although employees are also responsible for their own personal safety, it's important for employers to provide safety training and procedures to prevent potential injuries.
The advantages of maintaining a safe workplace far outweigh all the work employers and managers have to do to set procedures in place in the first place. First of all you prevent injuries and maintain the health of your employees. Second, you improve your productivity if your workers feel safe and comfortable in their surroundings.
If an accident should occur, you could potentially lose hours of production because you have to investigate the cause of the accident. Not to mention the possibility of having to replace and retrain a new or temporary employee should a worker become incapacitated due to an injury.
In many countries, the government has set regulations about what kind of procedures you need to put in place to protect your employees. Make sure you check with your local government representatives on what the requirements are when it comes to this. Failure to cooperate with set guidelines could result in you losing your operating or business license.
If you don't have a health and safety expert already in your employ, it would be a good idea to hire a consultant to go through your current procedures if you have any. A third party consultant will be able to see things that you may have missed and provide you with an objective point of view.
One of the first things you can do to keep your workplace free from potential dangers is to put an office safety checklist in place. This should be done at the beginning of each workday or as often as required. This keeps your employees aware of potential dangers in their immediate environment because they need to look for them before they move on to their tasks for the day. It keeps them vigilant and careful which is half the battle when it comes to preventing harm.