Maintaining a safe and sound work environment is crucial for every industry. However certain industries like construction, electrical, manufacturing, and laboratory units are more prone to workplace injuries and deaths. But that doesn’t take away the importance of health and safety programs in every workplace. So if you are the manager of a team or owner of a company, get in touch with a reliable health and safety program provider like Safeline Group of Companies. They can do site safety inspections, health and safety programs, on-site health safety training services, and audits.
These training sessions featuring certain guidelines and rules can play a crucial role in protecting millions of workers across the country and beyond. According to Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, there were over 161 work-related death claims and 3.65 million missed work days due to accidents and disease in 2021 alone. When we talk about safety and health training programs, the size of your organization does not matter. If you have employees or you are responsible for managing a team of coworkers, safety training should be your priority.
Better Hazard Awareness
The key role of health and safety programs is to “find and fix” workplace hazards. This can help your employees to identify potential hazards that they tend to oversee and ignore on their daily job or might not have recognized otherwise. Hence the program can create a height and hazard awareness level for the employees in both the workplace and at home. Moreover, the approach can enable an employer to establish their commitment to safety. For instance, when an employee identifies a hazard and raises concern, it can give the employer an opportunity to swiftly move and correct the issue and boost overall safety.
It’s the Law
This might seem like an obvious point, but health and safety training is not optional! Created in 1978 by an Act of Parliament, the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) is responsible for regulating healthy and safe working environments as a fundamental right of every person in the country. It requires both the employees and employers to take rational and practical steps for ensuring health and safety in the workplace. Breaking these laws can have serious consequences for any company as the government continues to pursue a zero-tolerance policy against the offenders.
More Employee Engagement
Developing and implementing health and safety program schedules also requires full participation. This is directly proportional to more employees getting involved in adding value to the company. A successful safety and health program will involve everything from getting written programs to bringing boots on the ground for safety inspections to finding out potential hazards together as a team. Since such programs will incorporate employees from every level and department, they will feel a sense of belonging – as their voices will be heard and their contributions will be acknowledged.
Cost Reduction
Attorney fees and medical expenses can quickly accumulate to become a significant amount for every company if they disregard health and safety programs. For instance, long-term rehabilitation costs for an injured employee or compensation payments and litigation costs for a negligent worker’s death can quickly boom to cost your company heavily. A sound safety and health program in place will help you to create a knowledgeable workforce and alleviate these costs. There are also indirect costs like disrupted work schedules, loss of productivity, training, and recruiting replacement workers, possible litigation due to negative publicity, and injury investigations that can be avoided with these programs.
Corporate and Social Responsibility
News about negligent deaths and workplace hazards can negatively affect socially conscious clients of your company. To achieve a good standing and high recognition in your industry, it is important for your company to be compliant with all the safety and health requirements. It can attract new customers and improve customer loyalty as modern brands are socially aware of the right and wrong of work ethics and practices.
Your workers are prone to workplace illnesses, injuries, or even death. It can be stressful and expensive to deal with the legal repercussions of such incidents. So implementing safety and health programs can ensure that your organization follows applicable government regulations for preventing deaths and injuries at the workplace and reducing the risk of penalties. Health and safety training is important as it can unite the employees and the employers in the spirit of a common goal – to regulate a secure and safe workplace. These training sessions can ensure the success and safety of everyone involved and such policies can outweigh the cost of the training sessions.
