You often hear stories in the media about how employers get sued by workers over unsafe working conditions. And, on some occasions, you will even hear horror stories of how employees die on the job because of such issues!
Running a business can be challenging at the best of times. But regardless of whether you are a small business owner or you head a large corporation, it is your legal responsibility to ensure that your working environment is a safe one for your employees.
The sad truth is that we live in an era of litigation. So if you want to make sure that you take any reasonable steps possible to prevent your company from being sued by anyone that it employs, take a look through the following handy hints and tips!
Maintain regular workplace assessments
Just because the areas where your employees work might have been declared safe one day doesn’t necessarily mean they will be safe in a few weeks, months or years’ time! Therefore, it makes sense to carry out regular inspections of all working environments.
Your workplace assessments should ensure that employees have a low risk of being injured by furniture or machinery in their working environment and that all gas and electricity systems are safe and conform to building codes.
Hire the right people for the job
Believe it or not, one of the main reasons why employees sue the companies they work for is because they have not been trained properly. Obviously you don’t want to go and hire someone to operate heavy machinery if they have only ever sat behind a desk in past jobs, for example!
Whenever you recruit new staff members, make sure that they are competent and able to complete the duties that you require of them. Ensure that your application forms and interviewers ask potential candidates the right questions to save you time – and money.
Communicate workplace policies to your employees
If employees are required to operate machinery or perform their work in a certain way, the onus is on you to make sure that they know what they are doing.
Workplace policies can include a variety of information, such as health and safety details, hazardous materials handling procedures, storage instructions for machinery and materials, and so forth.
Companies will often evolve into creating new products or using new machinery as time goes on, so you will need to update your workplace policies to reflect those changes.
Speak to an employment lawyer
Finally, you should always have the details of a trusted employment lawyer to hand. It would be foolish to assume that there will never be any workplace issues that arise from employees in the future.
Employment lawyers don’t just sue people; they also operate in an advisory capacity. That means you can benefit from their expert knowledge on employment law so that you don’t fall afoul of it.
Visit rosslawgroup.com for further details on how an employment lawyer can benefit your business. Thanks for reading, I hope you have found the information in this blog post useful!
