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When you are setting up your own business, health and safety might not be the most exciting part. However, making sure that your employees are safe and healthy is paramount to your overall successes.

The vast majority of accidents should be easy to avoid with careful attention to detail. Just as a workers’ compensation lawyer about the number of daft incidents they have dealt with and you will see how simple it is to prevent most accidents.

Provide Proper Training

Proper health and safety is best achieved through training. This might be on the job training or it could be that you send your employees on an away day. If you can, you should encourage your employees to apply for further qualifications to better their understanding of their job and the health and safety involved. The better the training you provide, the better your employees will perform and the safer they should be.

Some businesses may be legally required to provide some training to their employees. Manufacturing companies in particular should be careful to ensure that they are in line with legal guidelines as the consequence of an accident on the shop floor could be catastrophic. Looking at the legal requirements of the industry should be one of the first things you do when you are planning a new business.

Create a Health and Safety Policy

Though a standard health and safety policy might work fine for an average business, the best thing to do is tailor your policy to suit your particular needs. Every business will need to factor in different things. For example, if you are a manufacturer, you will have a different health and safety policy to your average office setting.

Writing a health and safety policy is usually about looking at the risks in the workplace and then creating a plan to either prevent an issue arising or to ensure that you have a process in place to deal with a problem when it does happen. For example, you might identify wet floors as a risk and choose to put out wet floor signs.

You should never write a health and safety policy just once. This is a document that should be reviewed and revised regularly to ensure that it keeps up with the fast pace of your workspace.

Encourage Staff to Report Issues

Sometimes, employees can feel awkward about reporting health and safety issues because they might be worried about the problem reflecting badly on themselves or colleagues. This should definitely not be the case and everyone will be safer if you encourage your employees to speak up about worries.

Once your staff have reported an issue, you must then show that you are going to act on their tip. While you may not be able to eliminate every risk, making people more aware of potential hazards is the minimum you can do.

However boring you might think health and safety is, it is crucial that you get it right. A safe working environment is the most productive environment.