Safety First! How to Develop a Safety Plan for Your Business
In 2018, Missouri's workplace fatality rate dropped while injuries increased. How will your business reduce the rate of accidents and potential fatalities in the workplace? Do you have a plan in place so that people know how to respond when an accident occurs? Here's a quick look at the process of developing a safety plan for your business.
Size up the situation. As the first rule that is always taught in emergency management, it's important to start by understanding what's going on. What are the hazards to your business? Flood? Fire? Earthquake? Power loss? Tornados? Start by figuring out what is most likely to cause problems in your area and how you should respond to those hazards.
Run triage. In medical terms, triage is figuring out what actions will do the most good in the shortest amount of time. Do you have manufacturing processes that will kill your machinery if they're not completed? Refrigerated storage that has to stay cold? Potential loss of life from issues with chemical storage? Slip and fall concerns? Start with the areas where you can do the most good first, then move on.
Plan to have a plan. Develop a safety plan for your major areas of concern, then document them as part of your business processes and procedures. This way, when nobody's quite sure what to do during an emergency, they can simply open the employee manual and follow the directions inside.
Train, exercise and review. When you onboard new employees, find out what their skills are, if they'd like to help with emergency response in the business and make safety training part of the process. Run regular exercises to get everyone used to the process. Review the exercises and adjust procedures if something doesn't work.
By developing a safety plan for your company, you can help your employees respond more quickly after a workplace accident occurs, mitigating the results of that accident. But what if you're not quite sure how to develop a safety plan for your company? At AccountRely, we have a number of business professionals available to help you create the business strategies you need to stay successful. Please feel free to reach out today to get started.
