Industrial workplace safety tips for regulatory compliance

According to the 2020 Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index, disabling workplace injuries cost U.S. businesses more than $59 billion every year and the top 10 causes of workplace injuries cost U.S. businesses over $1 billion per week. For industries looking to mitigate these costs, understanding and implementing industrial workplace safety tips is crucial. On top of these costs, it’s essential to maintain a happy and healthy workforce to maximize production levels and attract and retain the best workers.

Here are some important industrial workplace safety tips that can help your organization exceed regulatory compliance, maximize production, and see continual improvements.

Employee training

Safety and health training keeps workers safe and ensures they return home as healthy and happy as when they arrived at the workplace.

Safety training is an integral part of your worker’s onboarding process. However, it also requires regular refresher sessions, not only for compliance but also for effectiveness. Over time, worker alertness declines, and they may become complacent. Therefore, refresher training helps maintain focus and prevent unsafe habits.

There are many ways to deliver the training your workers need to understand safety rules and procedures. For example, industrial workplace safety tips include:

• Formal training days where the team learns new safety procedures and safe work practices for specific job tasks.
• Formal new employee orientations to help workers become familiar with the new work environment and the company’s policies and procedures.
• Refresher training, as mentioned earlier, because workers could become complacent with safety procedures that could lead to mistakes or errors, for this reason, it is important to refresh workers knowledge and skills.
• Daily remind workers of the safety-related processes they will perform that day.

You can provide worker training however you see fit, as long as it’s effective. Your workers need to know how and why to perform job tasks safely.

Worker engagement

If you want to increase productivity and competitiveness, you need to improve how you and the company engage with workers. Employee engagement is the level of enthusiasm, loyalty, and connection a worker has for his or her job and company.

A worker who feels part of the team and appreciated will take ownership of his or her safety and become a hard-working team player. When workers feel valued the organization as a whole benefit.

Safety-focused culture

A safety-focused culture in your workplace means that your workers never feel as if safe work practices and procedures are an obstacle to getting their job tasks done correctly and on time.

This culture requires a visible commitment from leadership at all levels of the company. Everyone, from management down to frontline employees, must buy into what needs to be done to keep the workplace safe. Therefore, you can accomplish this by:

• Communicating company values.
• Demonstrating leadership.
• Involving workers—encourage them to speak up. Knowing that one’s opinions are not only listened to but also contributes to the safety values of the organization.
• Investigating safety incidents thoroughly.
• Showing appreciation for safe work well done.

Industrial workplace safety tip: Wearing safety gear

Personal protective equipment (PPE) protects workers from physical harm and hazards in the workplace. However, safety gear only works effectively when it matches the correct size, fit, and height of the user.

Common PPE in industrial workplaces includes safety gloves, steel-toed boots, safety glasses, hard hats, and more. Moreover, failing to wear the proper safety gear can lead to injuries affecting:

• Hearing from exposure to loud occupational noise.
• Lungs from breathing contaminated air.
• Head and feet from falling objects.
• Hands from sharp objects.
• Eyes from debris in the air or splashes of hazardous chemicals.

Proper use of equipment and tools

The most prevalent source of workplace injuries is the misuse of tools and equipment. When handling equipment, workers have to ensure that they use each equipment piece as intended and the correct way. For example:

• Using the right tool for the job.
• Ensuring machine guards are properly installed.
• Ensuring that the tools are in working order before beginning a task.
• Always wearing safety gear, including safety glasses, when working with tools and equipment.

All employees who use workplace equipment must receive thorough training in its operation and stay up to date with refresher instruction.

Industrial workplace safety tip: Report safety hazards

As an industrial workplace safety tip, train and encourage workers to stay alert and report any hazards they see while on the job. Moreover, ensure that all hazards in the workplace are reported immediately to a supervisor or designated employee.

Hazards reporting training is specific to each workplace and should include:

• What is an unsafe condition?
• What is unsafe behavior?
• How should a hazard be reported?
• When should a hazard be reported?
• To whom should you report?
• Where to locate hazard reporting procedures?

The workers need to understand that reporting hazards are encouraged across the organization.

Industrial workplace safety tip: Communicating with workers

When you create open communication, you give workers the opportunity to make the workplace safer. For example, by holding daily and monthly safety talks or meetings, you influence and prepare everyone on safety matters. In addition, you should allow workers to provide input and recognize safe jobs well done.

Effective communication is essential because it:

• It avoids confusion
• It provides purpose
• It builds a good safety culture
• It creates responsibility among the team

A safe work environment creates a productive workplace. Health and safety are not simply regulatory requirements; instead, they represent real business opportunities.

Moreover, you can boost your bottom line by improving health and safety performance. This improvement reduces the costs of avoidable injuries, illnesses, and lost workdays. As a result, it leads directly to higher productivity and stronger business outcomes.