Health and safety is important in any business and there are all sorts of regulations that you need to follow. Creating a safe workspace for your employees is essential and if anybody gets injured because you’re not doing your part, you’re going to end up in legal trouble. In most workplaces, health and safety aren’t too complicated, but in the construction industry, there are a lot of things to consider. There are so many more dangers on a building site and it’s up to you as the boss to make sure that you’re protecting your employees from them properly. If you’re a little unsure and you don’t think that you’re meeting your health and safety requirements, here are some simple ways to stay on top of them.
Invest In The Best Equipment
Equipment that fails is one of the biggest causes of injury. Even if your employees are doing everything by the book, they have no control over whether a machine fails or not and it could endanger their lives. The same goes for the safety equipment that you’re using to protect your staff. If you try to cut costs by getting cheap machines and safety equipment, you’re going to regret it when an accident happens. You need to go to professional safety companies like Ranger who can do a survey of the site and provide any safety equipment that you’re going to need. Buying cheap alternatives isn’t going to save you any money in the long term because you’ll end up paying massive fines when things inevitably go wrong.
React To Accidents Properly
Even if you’re buying proper safety equipment, there’s always the chance that accidents are going to happen. The important thing is that you know how to react to them properly. Make sure that you call emergency services right away and make sure that the involved parties are seen to. Once you’ve done that, shut the site down and make all of the equipment safe. Then you can start looking into the causes of the accident. Knowing what went wrong will help you to avoid any similar accidents in the future and make the site safer for everybody.
Regular Training
Another reason that people end up having accidents on site is that they’re not using equipment properly. Sometimes, this is just negligence but more often than not, it’s because they haven’t been given the proper training. Whenever you buy new equipment, even if it’s similar to some of the other machines you’re using on site, don’t assume that employees know how to operate it safely. Always give people training before they use a new machine and have regular top-up training sessions as well so everybody is always up to date with safe working practices.
Never Have People Work Alone
If people are working alone, they’re far more likely to end up having an accident. If they do, there won’t be anybody on the scene to react quickly and reduce the damage. It’s good practice to always make sure that nobody is working alone if they’re using potentially dangerous machinery.
Follow these basic rules and you can reduce the number of accidents on site and avoid getting on the wrong side of health and safety law.
- This post was written by an outside source for Morning Business Chat
