10 Tips To Help Prevent Safety Accidents

Do you have avoidable safety accidents and need help to prevent them? Workplace accidents are far too common. Each year, more than 2 million workers are injured severely enough on the job that they cannot return to work and need ongoing medical care. As an employer or manager, it's your job to help protect your employees from accidents that threaten their work and well being. Here are 10 tips that will help prevent costly safety claims from avoidable accidents in any business.

1. Start talking about safety. Appoint a safety coordinator to have regular meetings on various safety topics. These meetings can be as short as a 5 minute safety discussion or longer for safety training.
2. Revisit and discuss your safety policies often. If you do not have a safety policy, have your safety coordinator create one.
3. Post signs. Post signs, talk about the signs in your meetings and change the signs often so they don't become part of the decor.
4. Invest in safety equipment (cones, wet floor signs, safety vests, step stools, etc.). High visibility safety equipment alerts people of a potential problem and therefore they use more caution when approaching an area that is a potential danger.
5. Identify hazards and eliminate them - which in turn prevents most safety accidents! Have you noticed a puddle of water in the same spot every time it rains? Inspect the roof for leaks. In the meantime, grab those safety cones and signs to cordon off the area until the water has been cleaned up and the leak fixed.
6. Maintain equipment and tools as manufacturer recommended and make sure they are always in good working condition. Have your safety coordinator create a calendar to ensure all equipment is safe and in good working condition and routine service is being completed.
7. Ensure all cleaning products and chemicals are properly used and stowed away correctly when done using. And, obtain MSDS sheets for all cleaning products and chemicals. Also, have safety gloves and goggles available for products that require or even recommend they should be used.
8. Conduct regular safety inspections on premises. Create a checklist and tart with monthly inspections and gradually cut back until quarterly inspections are adequate.
9. Reward employees for making good safety choices. It is easy to say nice job and tell your entire team a story about how someone made a good safety choice that likely prevented a safety accident.
10. Conduct safety training for all new employees and remedial training for existing employees. Keep safety top of mind. The more that it is talked about, the less likely a preventable safety accident will happen.

  Most workplace safety accidents are avoidable. If safety is first and foremost on your employees minds, accidents are less likely to happen. Peer pressure works! When your co-workers choose to grab a ladder to get something just out of reach in place of their office chair on wheels, you will likely do the same when there is something just out of your reach too.