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Wherever your company is located, and whatever industry you operate within, ensuring your entire workforce is provided with the best safety equipment possible should be a top priority. Your employees are the backbone of your business model, and without them you will fail miserably, so don’t allow them to take risks by cutting corners and not following health and safety procedures, make sure they’ve always got their goggles, hard hats, and boots on whenever they’re in the vicinity.
Though you can technically ask your workers to pay for their own safety equipment, UK regulations state that this must be a mutually agreed decision, which means you are not allowed to demand payment for these sort of items. Still, if you explain to your team that the best safety equipment is simply beyond your budget, and the items you’ll have to provide them with are inferior, you might well get a surprisingly positive response.
So, you probably want to know why we all place so much emphasis on this safety gear, right? Well, there are many reasons, and I’ll attempt to describe some of the most important ones now.
Keeping Your Workforce Away From Harm
Firstly, safety equipment and various items such as the various emergency kits you can find from Storemasta as an example, is of paramount importance because it should ensure all your employees stand the best chance of avoiding injury whilst on your property. No one wants their team members to be sat at home on full pay under orders from a doctor, so don’t dismiss the difference thinking ahead can make.
Avoiding Compensation Payments
If any staff member injures themselves doing a job they should have been provided with safety equipment for, prepare to dig deep because the amount of compensation they’ll be awarded in court (or through a no win no fee scheme) will be significant to say the least. I had a friend who slipped over one icy morning a few years ago on his employers carpark – a carpark that should have been gritted to avoid such injuries. My friend broke his ankle in two places and had to take 6 weeks off work – the employer obviously had to provide him with a full wage whilst this was happening. Then, through a company he saw advertised on the television, my friend managed to score a whopping 5,000 in compensation for his accident.
Now this was mainly due to the employers lack of gritting procedure, but the same could happen if you fail to provide workers with goggles for use when operating machinery. Let’s presume that a small piece of metal flied off that machine and lands in your worker’s eye causing severe damage – you could be expected to pay up to 40,000 for an injury of this nature.
The Advantages Of Being Prepared
In most instances, all safety equipment purchases can be listed as an expenditure on your business accounts, meaning it doesn’t really cost you anything and will decrease your tax bill. Still, if you’re worried about the amount of money involved, you should try contacting different specialists and finding out about bulk deals – this can seriously reduce the amount of outlay required.
I hope now you understand why providing your team with the correct safety equipment like goggles, boots, even lighting towers if they work in the dark, is so vitally important – good luck!