Safety is Every One's Business

Safety is critical to any company's survival.  Accidents and injuries can impact your company in more ways than just lost work time.  Your workers compensation insurance company will increase your premiums and you could be placed into an assigned risk pool if your company has too many incidents or injuries.  

An assigned risk pool will nearly double your average premiums for workers comp insurance if you are forced into one.  Not only would you pay a higher price for workers comp but you could be forced to pay for lost time to workers who are injured and not able to work and for medical expenses in some cases. 

Every company needs someone in charge of the safety of your workers both on and off the project sites.  No matter the size of your company, you should have at least one person who is responsible to keep everyone up to date on training and safety.

You may choose to out source your safety program, in which case, someone in your company will need to make sure that people are being scheduled for training and attending.  Whatever your company decides to do, make sure your employees are properly trained and that they are adhering to the prescribed safety standards.

You should have employees trained in either the 10-hour or 30-hour safety training.  Every construction job site should be having weekly on site training or "Tool Box Talks".  Every other type of business should have weekly safety meetings pertinent to your specific business type.

In construction, you should also have a person on site, whether it is your superintendent or a safety director, who 'patrols' the site while anyone is working on the site, who watches to make sure there are no safety violations happening.  If there are safety violations occurring on site, they should be stopped and noted, with violation notices going to the company who violated the safety policy.

In other business types, you should have someone on site that watches employees, visitors and customers for violations or unsafe conditions.  Unsafe conditions should be corrected or taped off until corrections can be made.

Safety is every one's business in any business.  Making sure your company, it's employees, visitors and customers are in a safe environment is your business and failure to adhere to safety in your business puts your company at serious risk of loss.

Get your safety plan in place today -- don't wait until something happens and you suffer loss or worse some one's life is changed forever due to an avoidable accident.

Charlene S Reed, Owner/Author

www.MyConstructionOffice.com