Key Steps for Creating a Safer Workplace

Health and safety is one of the most important internal aspects of running a successful business, whatever its specialty or industry. Safe employees are productive and satisfied employees, while workplace injuries present unique financial risks in the form of lawsuits or legal penalty. But what do you need to understand about workplace health and safety?

Essential Understandings for Workplace Health and Safety

The importance of workplace health and safety cannot be overstated – not just from a moral standpoint, but also from a legal one. There are two key federal bodies that govern workplace safety and hazard prevention: the CDC’s NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) and the Department of Labor’s OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). The former is responsible for research into work-related health and safety risks, with the latter a regulatory body that enforces legal compliance.

Between them, numerous regulatory frameworks are provided that not only ensure proper workplace approaches to employee safety, but also provide routes to proper legal compliance with safety directives regarding a wide variety of individual systems and procedures. OSHA violations carry with them severe financial penalties – and even custodial sentences for repeated and willful offences.

Risk Assessment

It is well-demonstrated, then, that health and safety is a serious matter for workplaces to engage with directly. While the pressure may be high for businesses to ensure worker health and safety effectively, there is comprehensive documentation available on how to effectively approach hazard prevention.

One of the primary routes to properly identifying workplace hazards comes in the form of the risk assessment. A risk assessment involves touring your workplace and identifying individual risks according to OSHA guidelines. Each potential risk is evaluated for level of danger to workers, with potential solutions highlighted and an individual named as responsible for overseeing new safety measures – ensuring accountability. 

Active Interventions

Of course, practical changes to your workplace environment may be minimal depending on its nature. Power plants and workshops are home to more hazards than the average administrative office, for example. But this does not render office environments free of risk.

For example, trailing cables under and between desks are significant trip hazards, raising the possibility of entanglement and fall injury in workers.

Risks can also arise with regard to worker behaviors. An office worker with little experience lifting heavy objects might run the risk of injuring themselves attempting to lift boxes. Here, the implementation of training and workplace lifting procedures would limit this likelihood.

In general, health and safety interventions exist on a scale known as the Hierarchy of Controls. This hierarchy recognizes the relative safety of certain interventions, with complete elimination of a hazard from the environment the safest approach. The least safe, last-resort option is the provision of personal protective equipment; this is because the employee is engaging directly with the hazard.