BrightHR’s Alan Price takes a closer look at some of the biggest health and safety risks at work and how to keep your staff safe.
As an employer, prevention is key when it comes to health and safety risks. It’s your legal duty to make sure you follow the right procedures and complete the appropriate risk assessments to prevent accidents and keep an accurate record to show it.
If things go wrong and you don’t do everything you possibly can to prevent an accident, you could be liable, and employees can file claims against you. So to help you with this, here are some of the most common health and safety risks and how you can avoid them.
Protecting pregnant employees
If your employee is pregnant, breastfeeding or has been pregnant within the last six months, you need to take important steps to guarantee their safety. By law, you must evaluate the risks to pregnant employees and carry out an individual risk assessment to cover your worker’s specific needs.
To start, have an open conversation with your employee about any concerns they have about the working conditions. Assess how this will impact their physical wellbeing during pregnancy but also, the wellbeing and safety of their unborn child.
Your risk assessment should:
Identify any and all hazards. These could be physical, biological, or even mental and social. For instance, high work demands, long hours, or if working remotely, isolation and loneliness. Pregnant women should not take part in heavy lifting, be sat down for long periods of time or use a workstation that is bad for their posture.
Evaluate the risks and take actions to minimise the risk to pregnant workers. For instance, restrict access to hazardous areas at work, assess the ergonomics of their workstation so they’re comfortable and encourage regular breaks.
Make sure pregnant staff are not at risk of coming across dangerous substances or working from a height.
Assess whether they work in a role with a high risk of violence (for example security work, or if they are the only staff member at a petrol station).
Once you’ve taken these steps you must review the risk assessment every trimester, record your findings, and share them with your worker. Then make any necessary adjustments like changes to working environments, shift patterns or giving them suitable alternative work.
Slips trips and falls
Slips, trips, and falls all count as workplace accidents. If your employee falls over, slips or hurts themselves at work it’s vital you record it straight away.
Not only this but under the Safety, Health & Welfare at Work Act 2005, all employers have a duty of care to provide a safe place of work, safe access and safe work equipment. So, it’s important to assess potential risks (including slips and trips) to prevent workplace accidents.
If you fail to take reasonable care to provide a safe place to work, provide a safe system of work, provide proper safety equipment (when needed), or have trained health and safety representatives, you could leave yourself open and risk ‘workplace accident’ claims or tribunal hearings.
Even when you take all the necessary precautions your staff can still hurt themselves. Most often accidents are caused by tiredness, employee behaviour, distraction and office clutter.
To prevent accidents and keep your staff and third parties safe, you need to identify any potential hazards that could cause a serious fall, trip or slip. If your staff have a method for recording hazards and identifying risks, it can greatly reduce accidents and give you an accurate record to avoid the risk of any disputes.
Having a health and safety software with a tool for accident reporting means you can keep a log for your protection. But knowing which key details to record can be a challenge. So, here’s a handy hazard-report form to help you get started.
Fire safety
Did you know the origins of the term ‘firing’ actually came from setting the desks of departing employees on fire? To us, this sounds like a huge health and safety risk but then again it was back in the 1900s.
Hopefully, you’ll never have to witness or experience that kind of fire in your workplace. But if you do, having a working fire alarm is the first point of consideration to alert employees as quickly as possible and save lives.
It’s a legal requirement that all employers in Ireland comply with the Fire Services Act. This means making sure premises are equipped with the right fire detectors and alarms. And all fire alarms in commercial premises are tested weekly to check they’re in working order.
If you fail to do so, and your business is deemed a serious fire risk, you could face prosecution or hefty fines from HSA.
The Fire and Rescue Service will give you relevant warnings and notices, the most serious being a prohibition notice, restricting access to your building. But you can stop it from ever getting to this stage by making sure your business complies with the latest fire safety legislation.
In all these cases and lots more, it is your legal obligation as an employer to do everything in your power to prevent employees from getting hurt at work. Not only to protect your staff from injury but also to avoid penalties, failing inspections and a damaged reputation.
By Alan Price
Alan Price is the CEO at BrightHR and COO at the Peninsula Group. A version of this article was previously published on the BrightHR blog.
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