An average of more than 600,000 workplace injuries occurs each year, and these can range in severity from a paper cut to life-threatening injuries. A workplace injury affects the injured employee, but it also affects the business owner and the entire business as a whole. This is why employers are required to have workers’ compensation insurance.
To reduce the risk of workplace injuries and possibly eliminate them, it will take collaboration from all team members from the employers to all the other colleagues. There are four ways to ensure a safer work environment.
#1: Come up with a wellness plan
The best way to avoid workplace injuries is to make sure that there’s a low chance of them happening in the first place. Employers and employees must work together to develop a detailed plan specific to their business that includes a risk assessment and a safety plan. A risk assessment will evaluate all potential threats to workers’ health and well-being while performing a specific task. This type of plan should also require workers to report any hazardous behavior that another worker may be engaging in.
This wellness plan should also educate all employees on how and why they should follow the established procedures. Train employees on the correct and safest way to perform a specific task, such as lifting, moving, and climbing. It’s also a good idea to conduct physicals to ensure that employees are physically capable of performing a specific task. These physicals should be done yearly or before an employee starts a new position within the company.
#2: Provide the correct supplies and equipment
Often, a workplace injury occurs because the proper supplies or equipment isn’t available, and employees have to make use of what they have. This is dangerous, especially in the construction industries where PPE (personal protective equipment) is essential to the safety of the workers. Examples of PPE include:
- Hard hats
- Safety goggles
- Earplugs/ear muffs
- Reflective vests
- Safety gloves
- Steel-toed boots
If safety equipment is required to perform a specific task, it should be issued upon hiring, and employees should be taught the proper way to wear and use their PPE during their training.
#3: Ensure adequate staffing
Another common reason workplace injuries occur is that businesses are understaffed, resulting in current employees working longer hours. Understaffing may cause employees to cut corners to complete tasks, or exhaustion may cause them to make mistakes they wouldn’t usually make. Employers can help reduce this risk by hiring part-time employees to help with the workload until full-time help can be employed.
Adequate staffing may also require supervisors to monitor employees to ensure they’re following the safety regulations if a supervisor catches an employee performing a task unsafely and corrects the error before an injury occurs.
#4: Keep the workplace neat and tidy
One of the biggest causes of workplace injury is that the workplace is in disarray. Supplies, debris, spills, and other material scattered around are a hazard in virtually every type of work because it increases the risk of slips, trips, and falls, resulting in more serious injuries. Slips, trips, and falls make up the third most common workers’ compensation cases, according to www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/worker-compensation.html, right after contact with equipment, and overextension is the most common cause.
To keep the workplace clean, employees and employers must work together to ensure that all spills are cleaned up immediately, and wet areas should be marked to alert other workers that there’s the potential for a slip, trip, or fall. Employees should also ensure that equipment is stored correctly and that materials are put back into their proper places when not used. It would also help if you put temporary fence panels around the construction site to deter unauthorized visitors.
It’s pretty easy to ensure that your workplace is a safe environment if you have everyone on board with working to create a safer space. Everyone’s goal should be to ensure that everyone’s safety and well-being are considered to get the job done.
Unfortunately, not all accidents can be prevented, and workplace injuries may still occur. Again, this is why workers’ compensation insurance is essential for employers— just in case damage occurs. Still, everything possible should be done to ensure that an injury doesn’t happen.
