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Essential Workplace Safety Principles: Implement These 5 Measures to Prevent Workplace Injuries That Often Take Place near Machinery

The 2016 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index revealed that nonfatal injuries alone cost up to $62 billion in compensation among the United States employees – that’s excess of a billion dollars every week.

Now, listen to this. The total sum of direct and indirect costs resulting from workplace injuries is $100,000. This amount can even go up because of legal action and OSHA fines.

The truth is those workplace injuries are very costly to any organization. Your company will suffer a negative financial impact as your employees suffer an emotional toll as a result of the injuries.

It’s therefore imperative that you have a strategic plan to ensure that your employees are safe by minimizing workplace injuries. Below are the five measures to prevent workplace injuries:

1. Begin a Safety Training Program

Safety training is critical if you’re serious about minimizing workplace-related injuries. It’s imperative that you create a safety training program that’s specific to your industry.

It’s evident that the training program created specifically for an office environment will not be as complex as that of the manufacturing industry.

But, there’s still need to look at the basics of ergonomics, use of different machines, basic first aid and sanitation procedures. There are companies like Dynatect that can help your repair moving parts of your machines that could result to injuries.

2. Mark the Hazard Areas

It’s essential that you mark the potential hazard areas once your risk assessment team has identified them.

Usually, it’s good to include signage with icons and writings made in bold to enable anyone your employees or anyone else see.

For most industries, proper signage is no exception. However, if it’s not a requirement by law for your industry, it’s still critical to have them.

3. Have a Safety Manual

The next action you should take is to ensure that all your training and work instructions are clear to enable your employees to understand them. Provide every employee with clearly written guidelines to help them handle their duties properly.

Usually, there are basic things that your safety manual shouldn’t miss like the procedures for handling specific equipment, the right PPE and the steps to minimize the injuries. Besides, you should create a disaster plan for unforeseen situations like natural disasters, fires, floods, among others.

4. Identify Potential Hazards

The most common hazards at workplaces include gas leaks, wet floors, slippery floors, obstructing paths, heavy items, repetitive motion, among others.

Even though some hazards are likely to occur in some organizations, there’s a need to assess all the potential dangers to your company and the employees.

Maybe, you can appoint a risk assessment team to assess the potential hazards in your workplace and give you a report. The risk assessment team will provide you with the hazards that have been overlooked as well as the specific ones that are likely to affect your organization.

5. Invest in Safety Technology

By taking the steps above, you will be able to improve the overall safety at your workplace, but injuries may still happen. The measures above are meant to protect your employees, but they can’t identify who is at risk.

But you can all be set if you have an analytic workplace safety system such as the Vantage Predictive Analytics. Vantage assists in tracking various risk factors. Besides, it alerts you and your employees whenever anyone is at risk.

Bottom Line

It’s a fact that workplace injuries are costly and you cannot ignore the fact that you should take measures to prevent them. By following the above measures, you can ensure that you and your employees are safe.


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