When it comes to running a business well and properly, staff safety should be your main priority. All of the revenue in the world is meaningless if you have to injure or put your staff in harm’s way to achieve it. Luckily, we know you’re smarter than that. If you’re a small business owner, we’d like to help you elucidate your staff safety policies. These are incredibly important to get right the moment you begin to chisel out your staff policy in general. If you’re able to make this work, you have the potential to truly craft a positive working environment. More importantly, it will be secure.
Here are the attitudes to drill in your staff:
Everyone Is Responsible
Making sure that everyone is on the same page is paramount for everyone to share the collective weight of helping out when needs be. This means that staff members will diligently pay attention to safety evacuation policies, listen when you hold safety meetings, and feel personally responsible for the person sat next to them. After all, no safety consideration is complete unless people care about helping the person next to them in the event of an emergency.
Everyone Must Be Considered
While your staff may not likely have many disabled members, you may have a few on hand. It’s important that everyone knows how to transport these disabled employees down stairs in the event of a fire, using the trolley system prefitted. If someone in your office has an important and pressing medical need, then all relevant staff members and management should be aware of this, and continually check up on them regarding their paperwork and any other help they may need. Always be willing to extend the hand you may have always wanted to have been given in your past jobs. A boss who cares allows for the staff to feel competent in their caring too.
Physical Work
Most jobs consist of some form of physical element. This is true even if a majority of your workforce sit at their computers. Health is a form of safety, so make sure you constantly discuss it. Consider having ‘health days’ where instead of purchasing pizza for the team on a Friday, you offer them nutritionally balanced salads and vitamin drinks. Consider investing in standing desks, which can ergonomically improve the general physical health of people working in a sedentary role. Install a mezzanine gate as standard for any employee having to transfer a form of freight on an elevated platform.
Constantly inspect your building from week to week to identify any structural disrepair that can fall on or injure a staff member. Train staff members in safety eventualities that they might not even be exposed to. For example, training your bar staff in kitchen safety can help them in case they ever need to fill a roll such as dishwashing during a busy period of time. Look for ways in which physical injury can occur, and continually improve your strategies to stop this.
