The most important responsibility of a business is not to make a profit or to produce a solid return for investors. Instead, every business’s most important responsibility is to maintain a safe and secure workplace for its employees. If you don’t take this responsibility seriously, tragedies can and will happen. With this in mind, you must try to prevent the most common workplace injuries.
Design Workflow and the Workday with Safety in Mind
Taking safety seriously as an employer means integrating that philosophy into every part of the employee’s work day. The very design of how they complete their work and what they do each hour of the day must be taken into consideration. Some serious workplace injuries, for example, occur due to performing the same kind of action too often during the workday. If employees’ workflow is not designed with this in mind, it can lead to repetitive motion injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow.
Institute Injury Prevention Practices
You should also go a step beyond only trying to prevent injuries from happening in a passive manner. Instead, you should take a more active role in preventing injuries and accidents by instituting onsite injury prevention services. This can include constant training for both new and old hires on how to maintain safety at all times on different worksites. It can even include teaching employees how to perform exercises to ensure that they don’t over-exert their bodies while working.
Conform to OSHA Standards
The federal government agency tasked with instituting rules and regulations for workplace safety is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA for short. One way you should act to prevent the most common workplace accidents is by instituting all of OSHA’s suggestions for how a safe workplace should be designed. Doing so can prevent trips, falls, spills, and many other common accidents. Not following their regulations is foolhardy and may likely be illegal for your business regardless.
Continually Audit Worksites
Lastly, to prevent common injuries from taking place, you must be continually auditing your workplace for safety hazards. Just because a workplace was free of hazards yesterday does not mean it will be free of hazards today. Such audits should be performed before workers even enter the worksite, and more should be performed at different points during the workday.
Maintaining a safe workplace requires a lot of work in and of itself. Do not take this responsibility lightly. It’s more than good ethics to maintain a safe workplace. If you don’t take care of your employees, your business will suffer, and you could even be shut down by the government.
Bio: Anita is a freelance writer from Denver, CO. She studied at Colorado State University, and now writes articles about health, business, family and finance. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family whenever she isn’t writing. You can follow her on Twitter @anitaginsburg.
