Boost Your Business by Controlling Risk: Hidden Health and Safety Hazards

Some workplaces contain obvious hazards to the employees; working with heavy machinery, equipment, and general manual labor requires safety wear and constant supervision – but what about the hidden dangers that can be found in any office?

No matter what line of work you’re in, every workplace has a potential hazard. As its owner, you need to know how to minimize the risk and ensure the safety of your employees – so that they can continue to build your business.

Slips and falls

Any office with a floor has the potential for slip and fall accidents, and especially if the area is filled with boxes or other clutter. In fact, slips, trips, and falls are the most common office injury, and employees are even twice as likely to experience a disabling fall an office than anywhere else.

They’ll be stepping up on a rolling office chair to reach something, colliding with each other around blind corners in the hallway, walking too fast on marble or tile flooring – the list goes on. Suddenly, a perfectly normal office with rolling chairs and boxes filled with files doesn’t seem as safe as it used to.

Make their day a lot safer by using carpet on your floors, ensuring that the office is clutter free, and avoiding offices with blind corners in the hallways. Even if you’ve never collided with someone in the hallway, it sure feels frightening enough when someone pops up around the corner.

Struck or caught by

Another common office injury is to get struck by some sort of object. The objects they’re hit by are usually an open file cabinet with too many extended drawers, which leads it to tip over and hit one of your innocent employees. The same goes for large stacks of items, often improperly stacked, so they’re more likely to tip over someone.

It’s the kind of common sense we tend to forget about when we’re in a hurry – and with so many people in the same area, a poor someone is bound to knock into it and get injured. Make sure you don’t over stack your file cabinets, always close the drawers, and try not to keep large stacks of materials around in general.

The best way you can look after your employees is to take care of these small but significant hazards, and make sure you have a decent alarm system installed as well. You can easily get a cutting-edge technology to monitor your office and ensure their safety without having to declare yourself bankrupt.

Look outside the office, too

If your business property has any exterior to it, then you are responsible for it, as well. Look at ways to prevent accidents outdoors, such as investing in arborists and landscapers to maintain any greenery to keep pathways safe, fixing said paths if they need DOT paving, and using signs or markings to highlight any steps or drops. If an accident happens directly outside your workplace, you can end up having to pay for that as well, after all.

Viruses

Sure, your computers should also be protected against this, but remember that your employees are especially affected since they work so close together. When one gets a cold, it tends to go viral. Keep antibacterial wipes in the office, clean the keyboards at the end of the day, and go easy on the employee who calls in sick with a cold. Make a few of them come in, anyway, and you’ll make your entire office sick in a couple of days.

Make these simple changes, and you’ll be able to keep them safe and sound, without breaking the bank while you’re at it.