Are health and safety assessments meaningful?

Just about every company has its fair share of health and safety concerns for their employees. If you feel like you have done just about everything you can to prevent workplace accidents but you find that they are still occurring, it may be time to introduce health and safety assessments into the office. Some people find these assessments beneficial while others dispute their effectiveness. The purpose of health and safety assessments is to show your company where things need to be changed or improved upon as it can have a negative impact on your employee's health and their overall well-being. By putting up a few signs are you really doing all that you can to protect your employees from problems?

What a risk assessment involves is getting down to your employees level and finding out what type of concerns they have. Is the employee in danger every time they are working on their job? A risk assessment will help you to not only identify the risks but to see why there are even risks associated with their job. Are you causing some of the risks to occur by not updating the equipment your employees are using? What about chemicals in the office that your employees may be exposed to? Are you providing them with the proper type of equipment to protect themselves from exposure to these dangerous chemicals? Are you identifying the risks that you may be putting in the way of the employees and then are you considering the employee? Many times the employee is having issues based on their age, health, etc. You have to check your working environment and make sure you are making it friendly to all types of personalities. What your assessment will do it also help you to see what your policies currently state and whether or not you are living up to those policies. This allows you to have a plan of action to fix the problems with your existing policy and to make sure these same risks do not happen again in the future.

To work on the health and safety policy, hire a safety team to come in. Sometimes having an outsiders viewpoint will allow you to easily identify the problems as you cannot always see them on their own. What you may uncover is that the problems are not actually being caused from your company's issues, the employees behaviors are causing them. Employee behaviors do need to change and this is when it's time to consider using a program and method know as behavior-based safety. It will be able to help fix the problems that are occurring by changing the way people think and currently work on their jobs.

You can also pick out individuals from the company to work on health and safety assessments. They will be able to go through all the risks that they see and help you to identify them and fix them in a timely manner before they get out of control. The safety committee is hired on to also work on introducing a new safety policy if you do not have one or to create one that will help to keep everyone safer.

Simple things like improving the safety signs, lighting the Exits, and making employees aware of what to do in the event of an emergency will go a long way in helping employees to stay safe. There is a huge benefit to this as well as many insurance companies will drop your expensive monthly rate charge down as you have made significant improvements to keep your company safe and to prevent workplace accidents from occurring.