Ensuring and improving workplace safety must be one of the topmost priorities of any given organization, as it helps protect the most important assets – the employees. Whenever an employee is ill or is injured on the job, their employer will be heavily affected by the incident. It will cause disruption in operations, leading to lower productivity, reallocation of resources, and higher costs.
Moreover, if an OSHA violation is incurred, it will lead to penalties such as fines for the organization. Also, if you don’t ensure or promote health and safety practices in the workplace, it will lead to higher turnover, lower productivity, and ultimately affect your reputation.
That being said, let’s explore the benefits of promoting health and safety practices in the workplace, some practices that can help, and how an organization can significantly reduce costs and incidents with a workplace safety application and simplify OSHA compliance.
Benefits of health and safety practices in the workplace
Organizations have a moral responsibility to ensure a safe and secure workplace for their employees. The responsible employers know that doing so not only helps them but their workers, families – reducing costs for everyone involved.
While we’ve already covered what are some of the many negative consequences of not ensuring or promoting workplace safety practices, let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of ensuring health and safety practices in the workplace.
Promoting health and safety practices within the organization can:
- Ensure compliance with various regulatory agencies
- Reduce losses
- Reduce downtimes and improve efficiency
- Reduce administrative costs
- Boost employee morale
- Improve the product or service quality
- Prevent costs incurred for finding suitable replacements and training them
- Prevent damage to machinery and equipment
- Reduce unwanted incidents and accidents
- Ensure a healthy environment
- Boost the bottom line
- Reduce turnover and higher retention
- Strengthen goodwill among suppliers, customers, and the community
As can be seen, there are multiple benefits to ensuring workplace safety. But how can an organization improve workplace safety and streamline OSHA compliance?
Practices to improve health and safety in the workplace
Prioritize workplace safety
While many organizations do promote and practice workplace safety, not everyone is equally devoted to it. Responsible organizations keep workplace safety within their top three priorities because they know the costs of not ensuring it. OSHA is just one part – organizations that do not ensure workplace safety will keep losing money even after paying the fines. Thus, prioritizing safety in the workplace at all times can go a long way.
Implement incident reporting
Reporting incidents is one of the core requirements that lead to improving workplace safety. However, not all organizations focus on it. But why is it so important?
Incident reporting can:
- Highlight incidents (near misses, accidents, and illnesses) that occur in the workplace
- Provide opportunities to react in due time
- Reduce future incidents improve workplace safety
- Help with OSHA compliance, as it requires to keep records of such events
Organizations can simply plan, develop, and come up with an effective incident reporting system so that it can improve employee safety and reduce unnecessary costs. However, the best way to do so is by going paperless and providing employees with the option to report incidents right from their smartphones or tablets – but more on that later.
Provide training
One of the most common, oldest, and effective health and safety practices in the workplace is providing training to the workers. The training sessions should not be restricted to new employees or only when new machines are introduced. Instead, sessions should also be conducted whenever there are new and improved safety guidelines are introduced or whenever new rules require changes in existing practices. These will help promote safety among both old and new employees and create a safer working environment.
Conduct self-audits
One of the best ways to avoid incidents is by detecting and fixing them yourself before they even occur, and that’s what self-audits aim to do. Conducting internal audits can help detect gaps and trends that threaten employee safety, and help the management team come up with solutions to address them effectively.
Continuously adapt to improve safety
While many organizations do want to ensure employee safety, some are not open to suggestions from their employees. However, the employees are the ones who deal with the hazards, and they do know better.
Forward-thinking organizations take the feedback provided by their employees, come up with a plan to incorporate them within their safety practices, and implement them to enhance employee safety.
Use an effective workplace safety application
Organizations can reduce administrative costs and improve OSHA compliance efforts by using effective solutions built to do so. Safety Assure by CloudApper is tailored to suit the needs of such organizations.
Safety Assure is an OSHA recordkeeping application that can remove the administrative burden, reduce unnecessary costs, and improve workplace safety. It has a robust incident reporting system, training management system, and even a knowledge base to help keep everyone updated regarding OSHA and its requirements. Not only does it help reduce costs, but it also promotes safety within the organization and improves the goodwill of the organization.
