Nobody wants a dangerous workplace. Aside from the moral issue of putting your employees at risk, there are the economic pitfalls of injured or sick employees. A dangerous workplace is not an efficient workplace, yet it’s a common occurrence in business nonetheless.
As someone who specializes in workplace safety inspections, this is something which I know all too well. When I’m inspecting a workplace, here are five warning signs that I look out for.
- Staff on the Edge
Danger usually happens when staff is pushed to their absolute limit. If you give staff less time to complete a task but expect the same results, staff will panic. This panic is not safe.
If it’s a physical task — such as loading a warehouse or unloading a delivery — staff have to choose between meeting the level of performance their employer demands and performing the necessary safety checks. If it’s a mental task — such as writing a report or planning for a presentation — staff might wind up sacrificing necessary breaks in order to get the job done.
If you’re forcing staff to choose between doing something safely and doing it to your expectations, your expectations need changing. The simple fact is that you cannot do more with less; you do less with less.
- A Lack of Safety Training
The quickest way to find out how much safety is prioritized is to quiz your staff on the topic of safety. If you find that their knowledge is lacking, you have only yourself to blame.
Health and safety training needs to go beyond the legal minimum. You need to assess how much your staff knows on a regular and provide top-up sessions for those who don’t know enough. It’s standard practice to do this with every other aspect of business through KPIs and paid sales training. It should also be standard practice to do the same things for safety.
3. Safety Not Prioritized
How much do your staff know about health and safety? Is it as much as they know about sales, marketing, or talent acquisition? If they know the ins and outs — the laws and the best practice — for other aspects of business, they should have a similar level of knowledge with regards to workplace safety.
In order to make your workplace truly safe, you should have targets and goals for safety, just as you would for sales. The health of your employees needs to be treated as just as important as the financial health of your business.
- Accidents Happen?
You should know how many accidents are happening in your workplace each month and whether this figure is above or below the average for both the year and for your industry. Knowing this figure is important for some reason it’s important to know any other figure.
Not knowing how much money your business is losing is a strong sign that it’s losing a lot. Equally, not knowing that how many accidents happen at your workplace is a strong sign that a lot of accidents are happening.
- Close But No Cigar Burn
A near miss is a cause for both relief and concern, but it is not an outright cause for celebration and it’s certainly not something which should ever be ignored. If a staff member was almost injured in your workplace, everyone should, of course, be relieved that the worst did not happen. Beyond that, however, the near miss should be treated as seriously as an accident.
In terms of the severity of the symptom, near misses and accidents are just as bad. A near miss has the obvious benefit of doing no actual harm, but it shows — just as much as an accident would — how much that particular practice needs to be improved.
The reason for this is that near misses are only ever not accidents because of luck. You should not have depended on luck that time, and you certainly cannot depend on luck again in the future.
Justin O'Sullivan
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- Is Your Workplace Dangerous? Here Are 5 Warning Signs - March 6, 2018
