Top safety tips!

My top 10 workplace safety tips

Hey guys, its Doug with BasicSafe!

Today I want to talk to you about my top 10 workplace safety tips.

I’ll try to keep these simple and hopefully they can be implemented without costing you anything or taking much work.

My number one tip is to improve your workplace safety culture!

This is a very easy thing to do without spending any money and what it mainly consists of is making sure everyone is on the same page. Employees should know you are focused on safety and you care about their safety.

Make sure that everyone is comfortable talking about safety and that you talk about it often. Be sure to keep your employees feeling safe! It will improve your safety culture if they feel comfortable sharing with your when they are not safe.

Avoiding worker fatigue is going to prevent injuries down the line that could have been avoided if the employee was more aware what was going on around them. You can’t do much about fatigue related to sleep sleep unless you are overworking employees, but a lot of fatigue is going to come down to stress.

Make sure your employees are not stressed out!

If you have a good safety culture employees should be able to share when they are stressed, what is stressing them, and what you can do to improve the situation.

Know the hazards in your workplace and stay aware of your surroundings. Knowing the hazards in your workplace is obviously going to help you to avoid them! For example: If you know a specific area has trip hazards such as cords to look out for then you will be paying attention to those details.

Also make sure that employees are comfortable calling each other out if there are hazards in an area that another employee is not seeing. Similarly, If you are aware of the hazards you can make sure other employees are aware of them as well.

Make sure that employees (office workers especially) are taking breaks to move. It’s just not good for you to be staying in hunched positions or be immobile for long periods of time. This leads to fatigue as well!

Pay attention to workplace ergonomics, especially when performing manual labor such as picking things up. This may seem frustrating and tedious but down the road it will prevent injuries from popping up unexpectedly.

This is a pretty simple one and once again comes back to safety culture. If your safety culture is good then most of your employees should know they are supposed to be wearing personal protective equipment.

Employees should also be comfortable calling out other employees that aren’t wearing PPE just to remind them to wear it.

Wearing proper PPE is the difference between a near miss and a serious injury.

Make sure that employees are using tools and machines properly.

If your don’t have manuals and handbooks for the equipment make sure that you teach the employees how to use equipment in ways that it’s not going to hurt them. This also includes doing things like Lockout Tagout's and JSA's to make sure all the employees are on the same page.

8. Always be aware of emergency exits and plans

Keep employees aware of emergency exits and emergency action plans. You don’t want to be stuck in a situation where something terrible happens and your employees don’t know what to do!

Make sure they are aware of what they should be doing, what your current emergency process is, and make sure you're improving these plans as well.

Leading indicators are things like-

• Near misses
• Action completion rates/times
• Training up to date
• Training retention rate

Leading indicators should tell you where an incident is going to happen. (See Safety Pyramid)

10. More time with employees, less in front of a computer

As a safety manager you may have a lot of paperwork, spreadsheets, and different software that are taking up a lot of time. Know that there are tools out there that will save you tons of time and that you take advantage of them!

Also make sure that your employees are empowered take time to communicate about safety.

You should have more time to communicate about safety and less time entering in and tracking incidents that have already taken place. Get out and interact with your employees!

BONUS!

11. Get BasicSafe

I would recommend taking a look at the BasicSafe suite of safety tools to cut down on time spent managing occupational health and safety spreadsheets and paperwork by up to 90%!