To be a respectable, trusted employer in 2022, ensuring health and safety procedures are carried out as much as possible to protect your staff in the workplace is crucial. After all, your dedicated employees are the life and soul of your business, and your company couldn’t function on a day-to-day basis with their hard work and commitment. Staff members also tend to work better when they feel appreciated by their employer. We’ve decided to come up with this article aimed at employers on why health and safety in the workplace is such a high priority in 2022. Carry on reading to find out more.
Workplace Health And Safety Is A Legal Requirement
Don’t forget that workplace health and safety measures aren’t just there for PR purposes, and if you’re not careful, real people with families can get hurt. Furthermore, workplace health and safety ideas are backed up by legal legislation that employers must adhere to. The main piece of legislation covering occupational health and safety in Great Britain is The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Laws around health and safety at work are enforceable, and your business can be shut down if there is a pattern of behaviour of you consistently violating or ignoring health and safety procedures. Employers can be prosecuted or made to pay huge fines for poor health and safety standards at work. Remember, health and safety laws are in place for a reason. Before health and safety measures were tighter, industrial accidents at work and the like were much more common in the UK, hence why health and safety are such a high priority for business today.
There Plenty Of Ways To Prevent Dangerous Situations
Fortunately, a large amount of work equipment built today is built with safety in mind. There are tons of things you can do to protect employees, such as wearing hard hats, only using sturdy ladders, avoiding overcrowding by only allowing a maximum number of workers in a warehouse or factory space at one time. Of course, health and safety practices will vary depending on the kind of industry your firm is in. If you’re an employer with a large number of staff working in warehouses handling heavy stock, why not look into getting your employees some safety steps? Find out more about the Workplace Depot’s range of safety steps here, and they even offer portable ones with wheels.
Large Compensation Pay-outs Will Affect Your Bottom Line
Every employer likes saving money wherever possible, and you ought to work hard to fight against anything which affects your bottom line and turnover. Churning out regular profits is essential for running a healthy, successful business. If you’re found to have been negligent as an employer, and one of your employees gets seriously injured at work on your watch, the compensation pay-out you will have to cover could be massive. So, not sticking to health and safety can undoubtedly damage your business financially, and you may find it a real challenge to recover and survive.
Poor Health And Safety Will Damage Your Reputation
Your company’s reputation and stature are important if you want to continue to increase your customer base and become an industry-leading firm. Setting a great example is crucial to being an industry leader, which other businesses look up to and admire. Your standards must always remain high, and dropping them could cause your reputation to go downhill in no time. In addition, leaving poor online reviews is very easy to do these days. Employees will post about it online if they feel unsafe at work or their employer hasn’t adhered to the necessary health and safety measures. Making employees’ health and safety at work one of your top priorities will help protect your staff and your reputation as a responsible first-rate employer.
Customers Like To Know You Treat Employees Well
How you treat your employees can also impact customers deciding to spend their money on paying for your products or services and, in turn, supporting your organisation. Nowadays, employers who fail to treat their staff well and make them work in poor, unsafe conditions for low pay often find themselves getting exposed publicly for it. Customers in 2022 care about the way you treat your staff. You certainly don’t want to see customers flocking to your competitors because you fail to take adequate care of your employees. Treat your employees as human beings with families, feelings, and emotions that need taking proper care of and having their concerns listened to.
Employees’ Mental Health Is A Crucial Consideration
Today, we understand a much greater deal of understanding as a society surrounding mental health issues and the different ways they can impact people in their working lives. In fact, many employers see monitoring and checking in on their employees’ mental health and wellbeing as equally as vitally important as doing the same for their physical health. As a reputable employer, you most certainly should provide a way for your staff to access mental health support should they need it. You can do this by managers taking courses in mental health first-head or employing professional therapists, psychologists, or counsellors either as in house employees or freelance contractors. If you’re particularly worried about the mental wellbeing of one of your staff members, you should call 111 or 999 and seek assistance from trained medical professionals in the NHS.
It’s a very bad look if your company in 2022 is perceived as not making enough effort to provide appropriate provisions and support for staff going through mental health issues. You want to make sure you make people’s experience working with your company as positive as possible. You should be there for your staff during their ups and downs. It’s no use losing high-performing staff due to not making an effort to provide them adequate mental health help when they need it. You must do all you can to cling onto your star employees as they will propel your business forwards, and you really need them on your side.
To Help Keep Team Morale High
Being a great employer and having all the fit and proper health and safety measures in place will play a part in helping to keep the team spirit high amongst the staff working for you. Happy and content work teams tend to be more productive for their employers. Naturally, staff will not be very pleased if they feel they risk their lives every time they come into the workplace due to an employer not fulfilling their essential duty of care. So, workplace health and safety is so high on employers’ priority list today partially because it helps contribute to keeping team spirits high.
Other ideas for boosting team morale include putting on exciting work social events, having staff represent work sports teams, and providing extra pay for performance-related bonuses to reward hard work and improved results.
More is expected of employers in 2022 than in times gone by, and modern attitudes of employers towards looking after the health and safety of employees in the workplace reflect this. As an employer, you are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of the people you employ while they are working on your premises.
Also Read: Your Guide to the Best Tools for Employee Engagement
