Work Health and Safety at Work – Why Is It Considered as An Integral Part of Business?
Why are health and safety important at work?
Health and safety systems are an essential part of workplace practices for all industries in order to promote the wellness of both employees and employers. It not only benefits the workers but also the businesses. Health and safety solution is designed to protect visitors, customers, sub-contractors and people who are involved with your business in any way. Health and safety compliance reduces the risk of fines, prosecution, and reputational damage, and thus results in improved profitability.
Definition of Work Health and Safety
Work health and safety (H&S) refers to the risks of injury and illnesses in the workplace impacting employees, visitors, customers, and suppliers. Businesses need to do a risk assessment to identify the hazards and risks in their workplace and put in place control measures to prevent their occurrence or reoccurrence, as the case may be.
Importance of work health and safety
Workplace safety and health are important across all industries because human injury or loss in any business is unacceptable. There are safety and health risks at the workplace in every company due to unsafe working conditions, environmental hazards, substance abuse, and workplace violence. Employers are responsible for employee safety and assuring them of returning home safely at the end of the workday. Therefore, they should create strategies to ensure and promote safety in their workplaces. This will also help increase productivity and product or service quality.
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Benefits of work health and safety
It is no coincidence that the safer the work environment, the higher the productivity, ensuring shorter time to market and reduced operational costs. Some benefits of a safe and healthy work environment include:
- Improved wellness of employees and employers uniformly as well as greater efficiency and efficacy.
- Reduce the possibility of accidents leading to less downtime for safety investigations and reduced costs for compensation
- Prevent damage to industrial equipment costs and reduce the resultant replacement and repair costs
- Reduce absenteeism rates and improve employee productivity
Why are health and safety important at work?
Work health and safety are important regardless of the size of a company. A recent survey found that there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related injuries.
In 2018, 5,250 workers died on the job, according to OSHA.
Safety training and awareness can reduce injury and save lives. Some of the other reasons why health and safety are important at work include:
- Financial Loss and Property Damage – Death and injury impact the company financially. Putting safety first for both employer and employee can minimize risk to life and reduce financial loss and property damage.
- Increased Worker Productivity – When a company puts its employees first and implements proper safety training and education, then it creates a positive work environment that improves productivity.
- Improved Quality – When a company cares about its employees, the employees also care about their workplace, thereby improving their commitment and productivity.
- Corporate Reputation – Perceived quality and sales increase with a good reputation.
Establishing good safety practices including training and education begins with the employers’ commitment to safety and reduces risks.
CQ Work Health and Safety Concerns
Preventing illness and injuries will always be a challenge for businesses. Businesses should be more concerned about safety as well as risks and associated regulations. To automate health and safety tasks, we need a comprehensive approach to health, safety, and security in the workplace. ComplianceQuest’s Health & Safety management solution enables a complete Health & Safety program with integrated tools and applications ensuring your ROI is realized by
- managing the hazards and events,
- reducing the incidence and costs of workplace injuries while promoting a safety culture of accountability and responsibility,
- sharing safety information to keep your workplace informed and your team on point.
CQ Key Features in Work Health and safety
To strengthen your safety culture and improve performance, a few key features of the ComplianceQuest solution are:
- Safety Event Reporting: Promoting your safety culture by ensuring workers have easy access to report injuries, accidents, or near misses that could affect safety on the worksite. It can help to manage the risk, ensure an effective response, and if required, directly report to the regulatory agency.
- CAPA: CAPA enables companies to investigate and address unwanted events, hazards to facilitate change management by assigning to the right people, monitoring the workflow and providing full visibility.
- Worksite Inspections: Make your inspections seamless, consistent and timely. It is mobile-enabled allowing managers access on any device to assign actions for unwanted findings, all within one record for easy tracking and trend analysis.
- Safety Observations: Empower workers to engage in the Safety Culture and report positive or negative observations. Safety managers can use the data to assign investigations or trending and take action depending on what is required.
- Compliance Management: Our compliance management module is managed by Enhesa, the world’s largest provider of EHS regulatory requirements that offers the capability of undertaking a regulatory applicability analysis for a particular geography or operation.
- Stakeholder Management: With ComplianceQuest’s health and safety management solution, you can manage all your stakeholders ensuring their business needs are being fulfilled.
- Risk Management: Through our internally developed risk management module, you can maintain all hazards & risks in a consolidated document, categorize and classify risks, follow the hierarchy of controls, assign risk owners and frequency of review, alter the risk level based on the effectiveness of the control measure, among others.
- Toolbox Talks: Create and record the information for your Toolbox Talks, sharing the information and receiving the electronic signature of attendees from their mobile.
- Stop Work Authority: Record a Stop Work Order and manage the risk to return to operations.
- Safety Notifications and Collaboration: Improving Health and Safety communication and transparency.
- Analytics and Dashboards: Have Health and Safety metrics of your workplace at your fingertips for improved decision-making and oversight.
- Mobile Access: Access your solution on the go, anywhere, anytime and on any device. Get complete access to the solution including reports, approvals, record views, reviews, alerts, etc. ensuring business continuity and improving efficiency, visibility and flexibility.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can you promote good health and safety in the workplace?
A written policy: Create a written policy if you have five or more employees to properly assess your business risks and put measures in place to control them.
A proper training program: You should make sure that all staff is trained in health and safety. You should also review this regularly and train your employees periodically or when any new policies are implemented.
Get the right equipment: You should make sure that your staff are having the equipment they need to do their jobs properly and safely. It’s also important to have the right training and signage so that the equipment is used correctly and reduces the risk of errors occurring.
What your workers must do to keep good health and safety at the workplace?
- Be careful about their own health and safety
- Make sure not to do anything that could hurt others
- Follow H&S instructions, policies and procedures
How can EHS management help?
The most important role of the EHS professional is to create a safety culture that proactively mitigates environmental hazards and workplace safety risks. ComplianceQuest’s Risk Management Solution is an integral part of a comprehensive EHS management system to provide a complete and accurate picture of the risk landscape of complex business processes across global locations.