Safety in Your Workplace: How to Focus on Prevention

Rather than wait until an injury in your workplace, focus on prevention and harm minimisation. The promotion of safety and wellbeing of employees is crucial to a positive and efficient work environment. Here are a few ways you can focus on prevention when it comes to safety in a workplace:

Training

Training for a job becomes much more important when your safety may be at risk. Among other things, employers must give their workers information, training, instruction or supervision to protect them and others from any workplace health and safety risks.

There are specific laws about the information, training and instruction that employers must give to their workers and others to help them remain healthy and safe in the workplace.

The information and training provided needs to be easy to understand, but thorough, in order for a workplace to focus on prevention when it comes to hazard minimisation.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Personal Protective Equipment should always be worn when it’s required, there is no excuse. Safety comes first and a way of preventing any accidents is to follow the safety measures of using PPE.

Personal Protective Equipment may include, but is not limited to:

• boots
• ear plugs
• face masks
• gloves
• goggles
• hard hats
• high visibility clothing
• respirators
• safety harnesses
• safety shoes
• sunscreen

PPE is like a seatbelt in a car, it needs to be on every time you’re in a vehicle, even if you’re running late or only travelling a short distance. Don’t risk it. Your health and safety should always be priority, even in time constraints.

Keep in mind however that PPE is ranked as one of the least effective safety control measures, a level 3 control measure. These control measures do not control the hazard at the source. They rely on human behaviour and supervision and used on their own tend to be least effective in minimising risks. Workplaces must not rely on PPE to satisfy their hazard control requirements. Find more information on PPE here.

Resources

There are a number of free resources businesses can take advantage of to teach them and their staff on how to prevent and minimize risk to their health and safety. Some of these free resources include:

iAuditor

An app released by SafetyCulture that aims to help employers with their workplace auditing. For inspections and audits in the workplace, iAuditor streamlines the process saving you time – and possibly lives. iAuditor allows users to conduct safety audits through mobile devices instead of using the traditional pen-and-paper system.

Download it for free via the iTunes store or Google play.

ACT Healthy Workplaces Audit Tool

If you’d prefer to complete audits on pen and paper, this tool will help you. The audit asks questions about key dimensions of the workplace environment which contribute to the health and wellbeing of staff, including:

• Commitment
• Provision of activities
• Facilities and infrastructure
• Accessing external resources
• Resourcing
• Planning
• Administration and evaluation
• Inclusiveness and participation

You can download the audit tool for free here.

ACT Online Employee Health and Wellbeing Survey

Intended for use by medium to large organisations with more than 30 employees. It provides immediate confidential feedback for your staff on their health and wellbeing, with ideas on how to address areas of risk. Find the survey here.

This calculator can be used in two ways: as a business case to demonstrate potential savings your business could expect from a successful workplace program or to track progress of a workplace program that you have implemented or are currently implementing.

Workplace Health Savings Calculator

An easy to use calculator that can help to measure potential savings associated with implementing a successful workplace health program by measuring absenteeism and staff turnover in the workplace. The Workplace Health Savings Calculator allows you to determine the annual cost of sick leave, staff turnover and total annual savings of having a healthier workplace and can be accessed here.

Guide to Promoting Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace

This guide provides you with extensive information to create your own workplace health and wellbeing program. The health issues covered in this Guide include: physical activity; healthy eating; smokefree; reduced alcohol consumption; and social and emotional wellbeing. You will find the guide here.

Other supporting resources can be found here.

Culture

Leadership sets the tone of the workplace culture. Ensure that your workplace culture is one that respects and promotes the safety of everyone involved. Establish a workplace culture in which safety becomes everyone’s responsibility, and rather than “monkey see, monkey do”, employees feel supported enough to report any unsafe practices. Procedures should always be followed to ensure the safety of all workers.

A powerful advertisement you may have seen reminds us that everyone deserves to return home safely from work. Keep that in mind when on the worksite and follow the safety measures in order to prevent hazards.

If you want to keep your workplace safe and prevent any harm to your employee’s health and safety, then you should consider our high-quality barriers. We offer a range of high-quality barriers both hard and soft, along with variations that will fit the needs of your business. You don’t have to worry about deciding where else to look because we have it all. You can browse our extensive collection here.