Ensure Your Employees are Following Health & Safety Protocol

Ensure Your Employees are Following Health & Safety Protocol

You may think you have checked all the boxes when it comes to safety compliance, but there is one crucial aspect that most tend to neglect, and that is your employees. Your employees are not protected if they are not wearing protective equipment and are not following protocols consistently and compliantly. You need to have a system in place to ensure all the staff members understand and complete their safety requirements. The construction industry, such as crane hire companies, must especially comply with health and safety protocol. The reason being, accidents in this line of work can be devastating and result in serious injury, or even death. Employee safety is essential to your company and its ability to meet OSHA regulations.

Here are some ways to ensure your employees are following the safety program.

Provide training

Having an intense and extensive training program in place needs to be your starting point for gaining your employee’s compliance. Training is required in most workplaces from OSHA standards, which is the main reason to go ahead and implement training days. Your employees cannot comply with the program if they don’t know that the training is the key to bridging the gap between what happens in practice, and what is written on paper. You must instruct employees of the right time to wear the PPE (personal protective equipment), how to inspect it, how to care for it, and how to wear it properly.

Lecturing and watching videos is not as effective as employees watching demonstrations of employees using the equipment. Following the presentation, give workers a test to replicate the proper procedure themselves. If you happen to notice gaps, then it can be a sign that retraining might be needed. If you get new equipment or new tasks are introduced into the workplace, you should be retraining employees appropriately as required. For example, if your crane company presents a new slab crane, you must demonstrate how to use this safely. 

Make and enforce clear policies

Effectively communicated safety policies that have a matching disciplinary program are crucial to all safety programs. If your employees don’t know what is expected of them, then they cannot be at fault or held accountable for making various mistakes. Your policies need to be enforced consistently, and minor infractions need to result in consequences such as verbal warnings. If staff are repeatedly disregarding safety measures in place, then you may want to consider termination.

Engage employees

An active safety program needs plenty of communication between managers and employees. If you address only through punishment-based models, then the employees may become too afraid to raise any concerns they may have. Individual workers will encounter hazards and will notice different risks present. If they know they are able to raise concerns without any reprisal; you will have a safer workplace for everyone. You may want to label an employee as disobedient or lazy and commence disciplinary actions. It seems to be more productive to consider the reasons why your employee might not be listening and adhering to the safety protocols. You might want to also involve workers in helping to make decisions when it comes to personal protective equipment and the other types of safety equipment.

Secure some supervisor support

Supervisor buy-in is another critical aspect when it comes to employee compliance. Supervisors have a significant impact on how your employees perceive the importance of safety within the workplace. You need supervisors to send a message that security is essential, and often employees will look up to them and comply. Supervisors often know the employees on a more personal level and can usually tell you the way to get through to them.

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