With Health and Safety Week 2015 now upon us, there are fewer better times in the year to assess the true benefits of best practice health and safety within the workplace. Although the subject is much-maligned in some quarters due to a perceived restriction of working practice, the sheer number of people that are no longer put at needless risk when in the workplace is something that has benefited employees and employers alike.
As this year’s focus is on “Inspiring Excellence” from companies across the board, we look at a few of the major benefits that we believe come directly as a result of best practice health and safety.
Avoiding hazards at work
We’ll start with perhaps the most obvious one. Regardless of the business you operate in, accidents have the capacity to come out of nowhere. Every kind of job under the sun inadvertently exposes workers to hazards in some shape or form, and it’s the duty of the employer to ensure the right protocols are taken into account when work processes are being put into place. It is every Employer legal responsibility to undertake Risk Assessments in the workplace, to monitor and train all their staff in health and safety basic awareness at the very least.
The range of hazards will obviously depend on the nature of the work, but with a health and safety policy that adopts the best methods of prevention then you can guarantee that your employees will not be put under unnecessary risk when on the premises or at their place of work.
Reduce needless safety failure costs
By and large, we can attribute the number of accidents and illnesses that have been caused by working conditions to a serious lack of prevention on the part of the employer. Many workplaces are equipped with outdated safety mechanisms and operate using health and safety procedures that have dated poorly, leaving workers needlessly exposed to avoidable incidents.
For the last five years, there are still well over half a million injuries that occur in the workplace, costing companies in terms of revenue, productivity and employee morale. With a health and safety policy that embodies the excellence advocated during this year’s Health and Safety Week, these costs are reduced dramatically and provide a healthier working environment for all involved.
Highlighting your competence as a company
Although the obvious benefits of a fully accountable health and safety policy are written above, that isn’t to say that they begin and end with injury and cost prevention. A symptom of a well-thought-out set of procedures is that your company will be operating with an enhanced sense of social responsibility in everything you do. Health and Safety Week 2015 is all about celebrating those who have adopted best practice protocols, and sharing knowledge with those who are looking to improve – it makes fantastic business sense to highlight yourself as a champion of employee welfare, and will send a positive message to the wider business community when doing so.
For many people, implementing such a successful policy can be somewhat of a headache. As we’ve said, health and safety law will mean different implications for different businesses, but it’s important you don’t let this get in the way of implementing a way of thinking that fits in with the best practice guidelines. With the help of a team of industry experts, such as here at Park City, we’ll be able to help ensure that you can operate with a policy that not only adheres to government rules and regulations but to the exact needs of your company, too.
For more information on how we can help put this into place, or for more on the schemes and initiatives that are going to be occurring throughout Health and Safety Week 2015, be sure to keep checking back to our blog or follow us on Twitter.
