For risk managers and in-house health and safety professionals, nothing’s more important than keeping your teams safe. Injuries at work are incredibly disruptive to your workforce, especially if they are severe.
They reduce productivity dramatically and bring morale down. And if that injury was avoidable with the right risk management strategies, then your firm might also be liable in a lawsuit – which can cost you millions of dollars. So, avoiding workplace injuries is a huge issue for companies. Here’s how you’ll manage them effectively and responsibly.
New Employees
It’s imperative that new employees are put through rigorous health and safety training programs when they first join your firm. This is important in all kinds of workspace, but especially in those that feature heavy machinery and equipment that could cause serious harm to poorly trained staff.
Be sure to give new workers a complete training program, featuring new equipment as well as old ones. And ensure that those who have completed the health and safety training sign a document that confirms that they’ve been exposed to all of the risks in your facility or office.
Documentation
That first training confirmation will be just one of the dozens of different risk assessment decrements that your firm amasses over the months and years. It’s important that you find a way to store and access these digitally in an end-to-end risk management app so that they’re always at hand to prove that you’re doing all you can to avoid injuries at work. To that end, look to some of the world’s leading suppliers of risk management software – like that provided by sword-grc.com – in order for all members of your team to be able to access key risk and health and safety documents from their company computer.
Key Risks
Also stored within your risk management software will be documents pertaining to the key risks and hazards your workers might encounter on the job. Each of these key risks will have an attending mitigation strategy, which essentially shows that you’ve considered the many ways in which your workers could experience harm on the job.
These documents, detailing key risks that could face your team, are another important asset should you face an employee lawsuit down the line. But more importantly, they’ll make injuries and their attendant lawsuits far rarer – protecting your workforce in the long term.
Read Also: Work-Related Eye Injuries: 5 Reasons to Wear Safety Glasses at Work
Continual Reassessment
Your risk management is an ongoing process. That’s what key risk management software will help you to understand, providing mechanisms through which you can update risk profiles as your machinery, equipment, or even workplace changes.
By keeping on top of new and emerging risks and planning effectively to avoid them developing into real-world harm, you’ll prevent injuries at work. Place a key individual in charge of this continual reassessment, and have them regularly report to an executive. That way, your firm will be aware of all risks from the top down. And that’ll keep your workers as safe as possible in the workplace.
Make sure you follow the above advice in order to make accidents and injuries at work far more improbable – and workplace injury lawsuits ineffective.
