Workplace injuries happen often. They occur in every state and every major city. They happen with small companies and large ones.
A careless worker can cause an injury, but unsafe working conditions might also come into play. As an employer, you can avoid workplace injuries with some common-sense rules.
We’ll talk about how to avoid workplace accidents in the following article.
Conduct Employee Training Seminars
Georgia companies reported 78,000 workplace injuries in 2019. That’s typical. If you look at state workplace injury reports, thousands occur every year without fail.
To avoid workplace injuries, you can conduct employee training seminars. Even if you work in an office setting where you think not much danger exists, you should still conduct meetings that detail possible injury or accident scenarios.
You can hire companies to run these seminars. Many of them exist, and some are industry-specific. You can bring in experts who know all about the likeliest injury and accident causes. They will talk about stats and go through common injury events they’ve seen.
You might hold these seminars once every year or a couple of times per year. If someone stays with your company for years, they might find these events tedious, but they’re still necessary. Safety remains crucial, and safe behavior reminders are always worth it.
Avoid Intoxicated Worker Incidents
As an employer, you doubtless tell your workers when you hire them that they can’t clock in if they’re intoxicated. That means they can’t drink alcohol before their shifts, smoke recreational marijuana in legal weed states, or ingest any other illegal or illicit substances.
You can drug-test your workers, and you can also watch them while they’re working. If you see any employee who seems intoxicated, you can make them go home. You can fire them for cause if necessary.
You can’t ignore any worker who seems intoxicated. That’s an easy way for that worker to cause an accident, and then you’ll have fallout from that. Accidents hurt overall employee morale. If would-be employees hear accidents often occur on company property, they won’t want to work for you as much.
You must warn your employees about using illegal drugs on the job, but make sure they don’t take legal ones that impact their performance, either. Some prescription drugs can adversely affect an employee’s abilities, and they should never take those before working.
Don’t Cut Corners
You should always follow protocol and encourage your workers to do the same. Cutting corners can cause accidents, and those cause injuries.
You probably have established rules in place, especially if you do manufacturing of some kind. Any time you work in a warehouse around heavy machinery, you’ll develop safety protocols that you and your employees must follow.
If your workers see that you never cut corners and always follow safety rules to the letter, they will do the same thing. You can lead by example.
Don’t Schedule Back-to-Back Shifts
You might feel short-staffed sometimes. Maybe you have some workers quit suddenly, or perhaps you have to fire several individuals for incompetence or insubordination.
If that happens, you might need to hire several new workers to take their place. You can get on that as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, you don’t have enough workers to cover all of the shifts.
You might want to offer workers back-to-back shifts and overtime hours. They might jump at that opportunity. There’s a problem, though. Back-to-back shifts can cause fatigue, and fatigue causes accidents and injuries.
Hire new workers quickly, but don’t give employees back-to-back shifts in the meantime. Close the building, if necessary, but avoid leaving employees working for many hours at a time. These situations get dangerous quickly.
Don’t Hire Inexperienced Workers
You can also avoid accidents and injuries by never hiring inexperienced workers or employees who don’t know your niche or industry. You can train your workers sometimes, but if you do this, never let them operate machinery or give them responsibilities until you feel sure they can handle the tasks you give them.
Hiring inexperienced workers and letting them work with complicated or heavy machinery immediately spells disaster if they don’t have the requisite skill set. Even if they say they know how to use the equipment, check their resumes carefully and contact their former employers. As a company owner or operator, you must find out if the person you’re hiring has the skill set they claim.
These rules should prevent many injuries and accidents.
