In your workplace, it’s imperative that you consider the safety of yourself and your employees. Creating a workplace safety initiative is an excellent place to start. It will be a process to determine all risks and adjust to any changes, but it will ensure the well-being of everyone in the workplace.
Determine Your Risks
Before creating a workplace safety initiative, you need to know what to include by determining the risks in your workplace. First, you should have a professional assessment done of any hazards. These hazards could be related to the building itself, the environment (such as air quality), or the activities done on the job such as operating machinery. Along with a professional assessment, survey your employees on any risks they are aware of. Your employees are the ones who are in the working environment every day. They will be more in tune with the risks associated with the job. Determining risks can also be done by thoroughly investigating any accidents or injuries. It’s likely that many are preventable and keeping track of these incidents will help you know what risks to look out for.
Make Education a Priority
In order for your workplace safety initiative to be successful, it is essential that everyone is aware of the regulations made. Make sure you put your initiative in writing and have all of your employees sign once they’ve read it. Go over safety training regularly to ensure your employees are still aware of regulations. Go over the regulations with new or transferred employees. It’s also a good idea to go over the initiative if there are any changes made such as new equipment being added or new hazards being noticed.
Measuring Success
In order to maintain safety in the workplace, you will need to evaluate the success of your initiative. One measure is to see if the rate of incidents changes. The OSHA Incident Rate offers a useful metric for how often injuries occur in your workplace. This incident rate will measure your workplace against other businesses in the same field. Doing so allows you to see how your workplace compares with the national average and then you can adjust your workplace safety accordingly.
The process of creating a workplace safety initiative may be long, but it will be very inclusive of your employees. You can get their feedback and show that you value their safety. Make sure you make education and evaluation a priority as you begin the process.
It might surprise you how easily different areas of your business become overly complicated. Complicated processes have a tendency to slow things down and reduce efficiency. Simplifying them can provide greater clarity and make them easier to get through. If you’re not quite sure where to start, there are some areas of your business that are likely overdue for some simplification.
Hiring
Hiring has the potential to be frustrating for prospective employees as well as employers. There’s the collection of applications, sorting through applicants, conducting effective interviews, following up, making an offer, the paperwork, and the onboarding process. It can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. Make things simpler by having a clear idea of what you’re looking for in an employee and conducting the interview in a way that allows you to quickly identify whether or not a candidate is worth your time. Also consider leveraging online programs that can streamline your paperwork and onboarding process, which can help speed things along.
Communication
Keeping customer communications clear and simple is key to keeping them happy. The more complicated and difficult to understand you make things, the more frustrated they will become and the more likely they are to go somewhere else. Simplifying customer communication means taking a look at the way you say what you say and the methods you use. If you identify deficits or overly complicated processes, address them. Don’t forget to look at how fast your response time is either. If you take too long to respond because your processes are too complicated, look for ways to simplify them. Consolidating messages makes it easier to respond quicker to customers. Make sure you put plans in place to prevent messages from being overlooked as well.
Meetings
Few people actually enjoy business meetings unless it’s because it’s a break from the day to day functions of their job. Meetings have a way of getting off track and taking longer than needed, so make sure they are done in a simple, efficient manner. Identify who actually needs to be at a meeting and don’t include anyone else. Have a clear agenda, send it to attendees ahead of the meeting, and stick to it. Keep Q&A sessions short and sweet. Before you schedule a meeting, ask yourself if a meeting is really necessary or if a simple email will do the trick. This will help you keep your business meetings simpler.
As a business owner, it can be tricky to know what aspects of your business really need to be simplified. Look at your hiring processes, how you communicate with your customers, and how your meetings go. For other ideas on aspects of your business that are overly complex, consider talking to your employees. They probably have a few ideas worth your consideration.
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As your employees begin trickling back into the office, there are several important questions you should ask yourself to make sure you are doing enough to promote the safety of your employees and business as a whole. Take a moment to ask yourself these five questions.
Are You Practicing Social Distancing?
Social distancing in the workplace requires maintaining six feet of physical distance between employees at all times. This can mean having to make significant changes in how you run things. You may need to implement a new, more flexible work schedule, such as one with staggered shifts to prevent overcrowding, or increase the flexibility of the worksite, like providing more opportunities for employees to work from home.
Something that can help your employees with social distancing is requiring (and even providing) face coverings for your employees to wear while in the office to slow the spread of germs. You can also mark six-foot distances with tape to illustrate to employees where they are allowed to stand or sit in the office.
Are You Doing Enough to Clean?
You should ask yourself about the cleaning standards in your workplace and whether they are enough. When it comes to cleaning surfaces, for example, are your procedures effective? You should be cleaning surfaces in your office every day. If you are outsourcing, ask things like, are cleaners wearing disposable gloves while cleaning? Are the products that they are using effective against COVID-19? Surfaces should be cleaned with soap and water, then with a disinfectant in order to kill all germs. The most frequently touched surfaces should be routinely cleaned even more than once a day. These surfaces include light switches, door handles, desks, phones, keyboards, etc. Check to see if you are following pandemic-specific recommendations for keeping your office clean. There is often local guidance that should be followed.
Are Your Employees Staying Home When Sick?
Thankfully, gone are the days of bravado, forcing yourself into work even when you feel absolutely awful. Your employees should not come to work if they feel ill and/or exhibit any coronavirus symptoms. Make sure employees are carefully monitoring their state of health. You could enforce this through mandatory temperature and symptom checks, or you can ask them to keep track of their health on their own.
Do your employees feel comfortable staying home if they are sick? Do you have protections in place such as paid sick leave and the option to work from home to ensure your employees do not feel pressured to go to work when feeling under the weather? You do not want one sick employee to risk the health and safety of your entire office.
Are You Providing PPE?
I’ve seen the wild debates about making employees wear masks and for me, there is no debate. Wear a mask. Require that your employees wear a mask. Provide masks. It is important that you train your employees on the proper way to handle and wear masks. Pay attention to any local laws and guidelines. If employees don’t want to wear one or have a disability and can’t wear one and they can work from home, allow it. If they can’t, remember to use the interactive process for looking into reasonable accommodations. Now isn’t the time to bring down the hammer, try to work through things. Ultimately, you have to do what is right to keep your employees safe and healthy. Have you put the right policies and procedures in place with PPE in the workplace?
Are You Putting Employees First?
Other than just the risk of getting ill, employees may be worried about their financial stability, social injustice, homeschooling their children, and a myriad of other issues. This is most often the part that leaders forget to address, but it can make or break your entire organization. Treating people as people and helping them be OK with not being OK is important. One great resource to put in place is an Employee Assistance Plan. These are typically inexpensive plans that help your employees by giving them free access to counseling and other services that can help with some of the major issues that they are facing in and out of work. What are you putting in place to help ease the burden that your employees are facing right now?
Think carefully about your responses to these five questions. Are there things you need to add or change to your business’s procedures? Making sure your employees are protected through PPE, social distancing, cleaning, staying home when ill, and helping your employee’s mental well being will benefit your office as your employees begin to return.
Most things in life run circularly. This is especially the case during these unprecedented times of COVID. If you take the right steps to protecting your employees, they will ensure the safety of your customers. If you ensure the safety of your customers, you ensure the safety of your company—and ensuring the safety of your company ensures YOUR health and success. You can do this by following these protocols:
Increased Safety Protocols
One of the best ways you can ensure the safety and health of your employees is to increase safety protocols. You can do this in a number of different ways. First, make sure that your employees are kept physically apart from each other as much as possible. Only bring employees into your physical location when essential.
Encourage cleanliness amongst your workers. Companies should use signs that alert employees to new rules and hygiene practices. You should also set up hand sanitizing stations or provide each office space with cleaning wipes to remind your employees to frequently wash and sanitize themselves and their areas. Furthermore, provide your employees with masks and gloves, especially if they frequently come into contact with customers.
Stagger Employee Shifts
To best follow safety protocols and social distancing during COVID, choose to stagger your employees’ shifts so that there are not too many people working within the same area at once. Since business is slower than usual anyways, there shouldn’t be much of an issue in decreasing your number of employees on shift. However, if you are still receiving influxes of customers, you can always implement different systems that either encourage customers to shop online or enforce only a certain number of customers in your physical location at one time. This will help reduce traffic while maintaining business and low employee numbers. It’s time to be innovative and creative!
Sick Leave
Many of your employees may feel stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to beinghonest about their health. Many employees fail to request sick days until after it is too late, either because they don’t understand the severity of the situation, minimize their symptoms, lack of paid time off, or fear losing their job entirely.
For this reason, you must take the time to educate your employees about the current situation and ensure paid sick days if symptoms arise—especially if an employee is found to carry the virus or is showing virus symptoms such as a fever, cough, shortness of breath, or sore throat. While it can be frustrating losing hours and employees over false alerts, it is worth the extra precaution and associated costs to keep everyone safe and healthy.
Keeping your employees safe is your number one duty as a business owner and leader. The consequences of not taking COVID seriously within your company can be devastating—not only for your employees, but for both you and your customers. Implement these safety protocols and take employee safety off of your worry list.
It’s always good to keep learning about how to be a better leader so you can better serve your employees. For more leadership advice, try one of our coaching programs!
It’s incredibly important to have goals as a company. Goals are what will help you get to that next level of success. If you reach a goal, setting your next goal will keep you moving through the ranks. There are many different ways that you can reach your goals as a company. Some involve the internet, SEO content, and different marketing techniques.
Find Capable Leadership
You may have great intentions as the company’s leader and owner. You’re only going to be as successful as the people who work for you. Hiring the appropriate talent for your business will help you reach your goals as a company. Everyone needs to be on board as the motivation level reaches new heights to bring passion and success to a company. Finding great leaders is the first step to making that happen.
Get Your Employees on Board
There are far too many companies that set goals at the corporate level but don’t include employees that work for the company. A goal should be shared with everybody within a company. Employees should understand what the main objective is. This will keep everyone on the same page. Information can be shared with employees through periodic meetings, newsletters that are released monthly, etc. You can even initiate some sort of reward program that will praise employees for the work that they do for the greater good of the company. There are lots of great methods of uniting your team toward achieving company goals.
Utilizing Tracking
Once a goal has been set, appropriate tracking will help when it comes to seeing how success is achieved. You can track progress to monitor if a certain technique is working. If something isn’t working, there are plenty of things that can be done to change the course of action. A goal doesn’t have to be scrapped if the journey to get there isn’t working out the way it was intended. Track search engine results, followers, sales and more. This is useful information that can be shared with everyone in the company.
Certain goals will inevitably be easier to achieve in a short amount of time. These short-term goals can really teach you a lot so you can go on to achieve larger goals. It’s ok if goals aren’t being achieved as quickly as intended. There should be an upward climb to success in order to determine if something is working properly. Don’t be afraid to change things up a bit to accommodate what is affecting your strategies. It’s normal for things to ebb and flow over time.
If you need some extra help reaching your goals, try some coaching! Learn more here about what options we offer.
It has been said that small businesses form the backbone of a community. There’s no question that this is a true statement, but in order for it to be 100% accurate, your small business must be an active and engaged member of your community. This means that you need to do everything you can to help everyone in your community grow and prosper. Here are three ways in which you can achieve that.
Raise Money for Charity
There are many ways your business can raise money for charities. You can have collection boxes, donate a portion of sales or simply make contributions. However, keep in mind that there can be many problems with ordinary fundraising if your business wants to raise money for charity. You have to account for all of the money and make sure you keep adequate records. It can also be complicated to raise money while not looking like you are profiting off of the fundraising, so it’s important that you are as transparent as possible when it comes to raising money.
Volunteer
Volunteering is vitally important, particularly for small businesses. It gives you a chance to be present, to get your name out to a large number of people who have never seen you before and to do some real good in your community. There is nothing wrong with keeping your business interests in mind while you volunteer. Indeed, it’s important. As such, find volunteer opportunities that align with your business interests. For example, if you deal with food service, working with local food banks or meals on wheels would be a very appropriate use of your time.
Join Your Local Chamber of Commerce
There are many benefits of joining your local chamber. It allows you to meet new people, network, find business deals and identify ways to get involved in your local area. Chambers provide great ways for you to grow your list of contacts. Furthermore, they can allow you to find the most efficient and cost-effective ways that you can make a local difference.
Of course, your time is limited, but being actively involved in community efforts is not only good for you and your neighbors, but it’s also good for your bottom line. Those are some of the many reasons that it is so important for you to do everything you can to keep your business community-centered. You can do good, meet more people and, ultimately, make more money.
