The foremost concern of employers should always be providing a secure and safe workplace for their employees. Whether it’s from burglars, identity thieves, or others your employee’s safety should be a number one priority. Below are a few strategies you can use to create a much safer office, whether it’s updating security or making small changes that reinforce the security measures you already have.
Remove the Threat Posed By Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
When people tend to think of what happens in an office, they may only give the worst-case scenario a passing thought. While office work isn’t quite the same as being a coal miner or a firefighter, offices can indeed contain safety hazards you should be aware of. For one, office work often requires a great deal of typing and that can lead to a repetitive motion injury known as carpal tunnel syndrome. To avoid this hazard, you need to implement plans for varying employee work enough that the development of repetition motion injuries is greatly reduced. You can also encourage breaks, and change the type of mouse your employees use to something more ergonomic.
Change Your Office’s Locks and Implement Strike Plates and Deadbolts
There are good incentives for many criminals to try to break into an office workplace. In some offices, money is collected from customers’ purchases or their personal information gets stored on your computers. Even if that does not occur in yours, the computers and office appliances you have can be resold for a decent amount. The sensitive data stored on company computers such as trade secrets and customer information can be more valuable than the computers alone. This is one of the reasons why office security is so important. Hire a commercial locksmith, someone like Door Resources, to change all the locks in your workplace so only trusted employees have access and install strike plates and deadbolts to make brute force entering your office impossible.
Utilize Camera Surveillance
One thing that definitely makes your offices much more secure is security camera surveillance. The cameras you use in your system should film entryways, sensitive computer hardware, and any other sectors of your business that could be security concerns. The installation of these cameras may actually discourage most criminal behavior. Crooks mostly prefer targets that won’t prove to be a challenge. The footage your cameras record should also be backed up via cloud computing to an offsite hosting provider to ensure your footage can’t be destroyed if your system is attacked in-house.
Inspect the Building for Safety Hazards
Significant hazards in the workplace often go unnoticed until an accident actually occurs. For example, the wiring in your office may have been installed incorrectly. That bad wiring could electrocute someone one day or even spark a fire. To protect against such issues, plan a yearly or bi-yearly safety inspection by a third party in your company’s building. Without an inspection by an expert, very serious safety concerns may be ignored due to your ignorance.
Office work doesn’t seem that dangerous to most people. However, office work can still be quite hazardous if the proper safety procedures aren’t utilized. This should include designing workflows to prevent repetitive motion injuries, utilizing security cameras, performing third-party building safety inspections, and switching the locks in your office, This can help make your workplace much safer. The work done to achieve a safe workplace is always worth the effort.
Kara Masterson is a freelance writer from Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah and enjoys writing and spending time with her dog, Max.