Taking Health And Safety In The Workplace Seriously

When you run a business, you take on a whole lot of responsibility. One of your main responsibilities? The health, safety and wellbeing of your employees. At the end of the day, as your business grows, you will need to take on helping hands to keep things up and running and to help your business to progress. But at the same time, you’ll find that there’s a lot of law, rules and regulations around making sure that your employees are safe while completing work on your behalf. Here are just a couple of areas to focus on to get started.

Staff Training

First and foremost, you should make sure that all of your staff are fully trained in all aspects of health and safety. There are numerous programmes that you may need to enrol them on. This can vary from learning how to safely carry items to online CPR certification. To understand what training your staff require, you will need to undertake a health and safety risk assessment, which will highlight all potential hazards and determine what needs to be done to avoid them.

Fire Safety

If you have any form of commercial premises, you need to make sure that staff are safe from fire while working there. At the end of the day, fire is always a risk, so you need to make sure that the proper safety measures are in place to prevent and slow its spread if it does occur.

• Fire Exits – your commercial space should have a set number of fire exits dependent on its size. If you have a large property that you are working from, chances are, you’re going to need a lot more fire exits than a smaller building. You need to make sure that all of your fire exits are clearly signposted with fire exit signs. These should also light up and, if possible, glow in the dark. This will ensure that people can still find the exits when it gets dark or if there is an electrical blackout.

• Smoke Detectors – in the same way that we have smoke detectors in our private properties, we should also have smoke detectors installed in our commercial premises. Every commercial property should have smoke detectors evenly distributed throughout the building. This will ensure that if there is any smoke or warning sign of fire, the alarms go off, alerting you and anyone else in the building. This can then allow you to start an evacuation process. If you’re unsure how many smoke detectors you need and where they should be placed, your local fire department will be able to help you further.

• Fire Extinguishers – of course, you will also need suitable and sufficient fire extinguishers within your commercial premises. Remember that there are different types of extinguishers for different fires. These include, water, AFFF foam, carbon dioxide, ABC powder, water mist and wet chemical extinguishers.

Of course, these are just a couple of areas of focus when it comes to your staff members’ safety. Hopefully, you can use them as a starting block to help get your journey in health and safety up and running in the right direction.