Safety, sexy?
So when thinking about improving or upgrading your business you probably go to equipment, marketing, uniforms, vehicle wraps, all the sexy stuff, right?
One of the last things I suppose people would think about would be safety and yet this is probably precisly the thing you should consider first. Remember, safety first!
Is it even possible to be excited about safety?
So ask yourself why be in business for yourself. If business is about passing on skills to the next generation, improving and upgrading the world around you, satisfaction of a job well done or being successful in general then improving safety can be a powerful and exciting part of your business repertoire.
Improving safety can lead to less time (or no time) off work recovering, less heart ache and stress, a warm feeling of community as you strive to make a workplace that is as safe as possible.
Main points to focus on:
Do your risk assessments - get it done. Find a company to assist you with templates and do all your risk assessments for all the regular activities you undertake in your line of work. This will serve as a starting point to get into a much stronger safety culture.
Setup weekly safety briefings of 10-30 mins depending on the content. Get feedback and talk about any incidents. Just the regularity of focused safety meetings alone will bring safety to the forefront of everyone’s mind, realising the myriad of fates that can befall a worker alone garners great respect for the tools, machines, environmental factors and tasks of the trade.
Engineer solutions to remove hazards from the workplace or work flow process. This can be a fun challenge to identify and remove any hazards that can be removed or designed out of the process. Knowing that certain pre-existing dangers have been eliminated will bring much peace of mind and a work place where workers feel valued and protected translating into not only less likelihood of downtime but more efficient up time.
Bringing all the above together to have a company wide realisation that safety and safe work culture is not a boring box ticking exercise but a very practical and impact-full pursuit. Its the old seen verse the unseen. The seen is the safety undertakings, the unseen is the accidents that didn’t happen. It can be difficult to make the leap from “oh, here comes safety sally” attitude to “lets get safe and stay safe and always learn and improve”. A part of bringing it together is also to not make this too onerous, not too micro-safety concerned as we don’t want to discourage safe culture by making it laborious. To this end any technology that can make reporting issues or incidents and reviewing documents easier should also be deployed.
Get decent sleep especially if on the road, don’t sweat the small stuff as stress causes danger, have fun but be responsible, your future can be changed in the blink of an eye.
Thats all for now, G’nite
