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9 Avoidable Workplace Health and Safety Hazards

Safety

Sunday, 11 August 2013

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Workplace health and safety hazards can be costly (to lives and the bottom line), but the good news is that they are largely preventable if you take the right precautions.

You don’t need to work surrounded by combustible materials to face serious health and safety risks, but the recent mine explosion in West Virginia, which killed nearly 30 workers, has called regulatory attention to that extreme end of the workplace hazard spectrum. Whether it’s a failure to protect your workers against carbon monoxide, the silent killer, or a sleep-deprived employee getting into a fatal car accident on the drive to work, every job comes with potential hazards.

Common workplace health and safety hazards include: communicable disease, transportation accidents, workplace violence, slipping and falling, toxic events, particularly chemical and gas exposure, getting struck by objects, electrocution or explosion, repetitive motion and ergonomic injuries, and hearing loss. Although some hazards are less likely to happen in some work spaces than others, it's important to assess which hazards are most damaging to your business and your employees. Some may disrupt your continuity more than others, some may pose more serious threats to employee welfare, and still others will result in the most time lost or be the most costly. What all these setbacks have in common is that thorough planning can forestall many of them.

The go-to resource for the legal requirements in your particular industry or state is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the arm of the federal government that enforces health and safety laws. "It's becoming a much more aggressive organization right now," says Jerry Laws, the editor of Occupational Health & Safety, a Dallas, Texas-based magazine. This crackdown is partly due to a string of recent, highly-publicized disasters including the West Virginia coal mine explosion, an oil rig south of Louisiana that blew up, and a fire at a Washington State oil refinery.

But ultimately, staying on OSHA's good side and protecting your employees isn't so challenging. "What they're asking employers to do, among other things, is look at your risk factors and see where your problems are," says Nellie Brown, the director of Workplace Health & Safety Programs at Cornell University's school of Industrial Labor Relations. While they aren't usually budget-breakers, many precautions against hazards obviously have a higher initial cost, but as the old saying goes, "It's better to be safe than sorry."