As a business leader, you need to be as committed to safety as possible. When you are committed to safety in your office, your work environment will develop a stronger and more resilient safety culture and bond with each other. When you know that your team is looking after each other as much as you are looking after your team, you will ensure that everybody feels safe and secure when they come back to the office.
Now, whether you are looking at creating a hybrid workspace or you are bringing everybody back to the office completely, you need to ensure that your team has helped with these office safety tips. From issuing custom ID cards to ensuring that people go through extra training at least twice a year, you will be able to keep your entire team safe when they are in the office. So with that in mind, let's take a look at 8 office safety tips that are going to help your team for the long haul.
- Conduct regular walkthroughs. If you want to ensure that your employees are safe, then you need to know every inch of your office inside and out, ensuring that you are assigning somebody or you are doing it yourself to go through the office and walk through to observe safety protocols is imperative. You will be able to keep your employees safe because you will spot when issues are happening. You should pay close attention to areas in the workspace that could be seen as hazardous, and you should ensure that your employees are happy as you go around. If you are not paying attention to the working circumstances of your employees, or the potential hazards and risks from collisions or obstacles or even poor lighting on the stairwells, then your team is not going to be safe.
- Implement a tidy desk policy. Really, this should expand away from just desks and should be all about having a tidy office policy, but keeping work areas neat and tidy is a great way to keep everybody safe. When there are no trip hazards or obstructions, you will ensure that everybody in your team feels like they are able to work in a good environment. You should also consider hiring a team of people to clean and sanitize your office every night. Not only is it beneficial to keep the workplace free of viruses and germs in the wake of COVID-19 it's vital that you ensure that shared workspaces are clean.
- Put an emphasis on employee hygiene. Promoting employee hygiene is important because nobody wants to sit in close quarters with somebody and feel like they are unable to work because of a cough or a sneeze happening. Employee hygiene is a very real office safety concern and as like we said, COVID-19 has really highlighted this. You want to prevent the spread of any illness and viruses between employees, which means you need to have the right controls in place, from mask wearing to desk hand sanitizers. You should also encourage everybody in the proper hand washing techniques with signage and even video training.
- Consider safety wear. Depending on the nature of the work, employees should always be considerate of the most appropriate clothing to ensure that workplace injuries and accidents are minimized. If you have people on a work site, for example, then steel toe shoes are important and if you are in an office you may still encourage closed toe shoes to prevent anybody dropping anything on their bare feet. Personal protective equipment should be worn if and when it is necessary and everybody should be aware of how to use it appropriately so that its effects are maximized.
- Ensure manual handling procedures are trained regularly. Proper lifting and bending techniques should always be trained with your employees, and this is even if you are not in an industry where regular bending and lifting is required. Office employees may have to lift heavy boxes of paper from time to time, for example, so training on proper technique is important. If an employee is not sure how to do this, then rather than put their back out they should be asking for help. If you don't offer this type of training to your employees then you are not having their best interest at heartIf you don't offer this type of training to your employees, then you are not having their best interest at heart.
- Don’t bring in tools or machinery you don't know how to use. If you need to bring in new machinery or tools, then you should bring in the experts to help to train your employees on how to use it. There's nothing wrong with a training session, and it doesn't have to be boring either. If you have large pieces of equipment coming into your office that will be regularly used by your team, training is something that should go with it. It should be a prerequisite of being able to use it.
- Keep cabinets and drawers and doors completely closed. Did you know that open doors in your offices are fire hazards? Keeping them closed is going to help stop the spread of a fire if one starts out.Desk and cabinet drawers should also be left closed so that you can avoid collisions and tripping. The last thing that you need is workers compensation for workplace injury when that could have been avoided from the beginning.
Make sure that everybody is aware of the emergency procedures in your office. From training courses in first aid to fire drills you can guide your employees on what to do when a crisis is occurring. The best thing that you can also do is bring in the fire department to help people understand the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning and assign a job of a fire safety officer to somebody in the building so that they know what to do when the fire alarm goes off.
