No employer wants to put their staff in harm’s way. But are you doing enough to protect your employees? Conducting regular workplace safety evaluations is one of the best ways to improve the work environment.
At WorkSafe, we understand the importance of occupational health in Wichita and offer various services to protect workers. In this guide, we’ll explain the value of health and safety compliance audits, plus safety performance indicators that you should focus on. Find out how you can make your workplace a safer environment for everyone.
Why Do Workplace Safety Evaluations Matter?
Every work environment poses some type of occupational hazard to employees, regardless of industry.
Physical laborers like construction workers could injure themselves while using heavy-duty equipment. Those within the transportation industry can end up in a motor vehicle accident without the proper safety protocols. Even sedentary office workers can suffer musculoskeletal injuries due to poor ergonomics.
Employers must prioritize workplace safety evaluations to protect their staff. Identifying workplace safety and health hazards is the first step in preventing accidents. While keeping employees safe is the top benefit of these assessments, employers can reap other advantages, including:
- Consistent productivity: Hurt employees are often unable to work, which impacts the workload and productivity of the entire team.
- Cost savings: Workplace accidents often cost businesses money between the lost production and investigative procedures.
- Higher employee morale: People who feel safe and protected on the job are more likely to be happy in their role.
- Streamlined operations: Workplace safety evaluations pinpoint problems that may disrupt a company’s operations. Addressing them often makes businesses more efficient.
Don’t jeopardize your employees’ well-being and harm your brand’s image. Take comprehensive steps to reduce occupational hazards.
Top Metrics To Track in Your Evaluation
Reviewing current safety measures won’t benefit you if you don’t gather the right data. Experts recommend tracking the following metrics for the best results:
- Total recordable incident rate: Keep track of how many OSHA-recordable incidents occur at your business over a period of 200,000 working hours.
- Lost time injury frequency rate: LTIFR measures the number of injuries per 1 million hours that lead to time off work.
- Near-miss frequency: Near-miss reporting highlights how many times employees bring up potential hazards that could have led to an accident.
- PPE compliance: Measure the compliance rate among employees required to wear personal protective equipment.
- Training program completion rate: Implementing a safety training program won’t do you any good if employees either never finish it or fail required assessments. Explore your program’s completion rate and crack down on training protocols, if necessary.
- Safety inspection frequency: Review how many safety inspections take place, along with the number of hazards mentioned in each one.
- Corrective action closure time: Monitor the time it takes your organization to fully address reported incidents.
Conducting workplace safety evaluations with these metrics in mind can make a huge difference going forward.
Use Your Findings To Make Positive Changes
The main purpose of a safety inspection is hazard identification. Finding occupational safety hazards and failing to address them won’t do much to protect employees. After evaluating your business’s health and safety risks, you’ll want to tackle them head-on.
Maybe you find that many employees aren’t completing training programs within a required time frame. This could ultimately lead to your total recordable incident rate going up. Instead of ignoring the issue, explore ways to strengthen employee training and continue to track these metrics over time.
What if your near-miss reporting rate goes up? This doesn’t just mean that safety hazards still exist. It also highlights how comfortable employees feel reporting their concerns, which helps establish a safety-centered culture.
Don’t expect to resolve every issue at once. It may take several different measures to fully improve workplace safety. Continue performing evaluations and comparing long-term data to hopefully find positive trends in all areas.
Improve Occupational Health and Safety With WorkSafe
Making positive changes from workplace safety evaluations is an excellent way to create a safety culture. This may include steps like implementing physical ability testing and evaluating ergonomics. If employees happen to get injured on site, make sure they’re ready to return to work with a fit-for-duty exam.
WorkSafe can help you with these services and more. Our Wichita-based team understands the value of a hazard-free work environment for both employers and their staff. Let us make your business safer with targeted injury prevention and management solutions.
Contact us online or call (316) 262-8800 today to learn more.