If you are responsible for employees you have a legal duty to follow the health and safety legislations. While this may sound daunting you can start by using these guidelines. A safe workplace will result in a happier work force and less accidents. This will benefit your company by reducing financial burdens caused by increased absences, sick pay, temporary employees, retraining, recruitment and possible prosecution fines. Training is one of the first places to start, and the NEBOSH qualifications provide excellent training for all industries. Tips on Improving the Health and Safety in Your Workplace
Provide training to your employees
The NEBOSH Award in Health and Safety at Work is the ideal introduction to health and safety. Training provides vital skills and knowledge which can be used throughout your workforce to ensure you have an organisation with a strong health and safety culture. Create a policy and make it available to your workforce. health and safety policy is required by law if you employ five people or more. However, it is a good idea to create one even if you have one or two employees.
- Communicate your policies and safe working methods with all of your staff. They need to be aware of the dangers they face and know the procedures you have in place to reduce, eliminate or control these dangers.
- Get used to writing risk assessments after studying the NEBOSH General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety. Risk assessments must be performed before anyone begins working on a task. A risk assessment will help you to spot any hazards either faced by the job or because of the way the work is being performed. When you have created the risk assessment keep a record of it and go through it with the employee who is performing the task. You should have come up with safe methods of work which you will need to show and train your employee in.
- Have a first aid kit and appoint a person to deal with first aid within the workplace. Accidents can happen, and so can illnesses and disease. You may need to provide training to one or more appointed persons.