Tag: Responsibility

What You Should Know About Your Employee Responsibilities For Health And Safety

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. When you’re a business owner with employees, you have some responsibility for your worker’s safety but they share some as well. In each case you have to be transparent with them. The following contributed post is entitled, What You Should Know About Your Employee Responsibilities For Health And Safety.

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As a business owner, you will know that health and safety are incredibly important. Being complacent can be an extremely expensive mistake, the costs that come from injuries and ill health caused by poor health and safety and working conditions are staggering and can severely damage any company.

Photo by Anamul Rezwan from Pexels

With that in mind, it’s essential for you to know who’s responsible for what in relation to upholding the health and safety in the workplace, following your health and safety policy, and reporting any issues.

For the most part, it is the employer’s responsibility. You need to make sure your employees have the correct safety gear, for example, and you will also need to remain compliant with local laws. With regards the latter, you should check with the local government on health and safety laws in your state and follow them to the letter. Your electrical equipment will need to be certified safe, and if there is a risk of air pollutants, you will need to hire a specialist in Ambient Air Sampling.

However, health is safety is not only your domain. Your employees also have a level of responsibility. Regardless it’s imperative that anyone on site is kept safe, including visitors knowing the fire drills, contractors working safely at heights, or your employees learning the new policies.

Some of the responsibilities your employees have to include:

Take Some Responsibility For Their Own Care For Health And Safety

Your employees need to take an active approach when it comes to the care of their personal health and safety whilst in the workplace, They should be avoiding anything that could compromise this. There is certainly no size fits all for how you put this into action. How it works is going to depend heavily on the working environment you are working in. There are going to be different natural hazards that occur in different workplaces such as an office compared to a warehouse.

It’s best for you to carry out a risk assessment on each working zone in your workplace and with each individual member of staff. You can then discuss the ways your employees can help to look after their own safety with them on a personalized basis.

Cooperation With The Policies

A big part of your employee’s responsibility is to make sure they are following the instructions that you have set in place for health and safety. They’re there for a reason so, make sure they are following the rules. This includes them completing any needed training, communicating with you if there are any issues, and noticing any hazards that appear that are unusual.

It’s a good idea to make sure you keep track of any training your employees complete, this way you can put steps into place to give them the time to complete anything that is missing or updated.

Not Putting Others In Danger

Ok, so your employees need to be looking after their own health and safety, but they also need to be making sure they’re not putting others in danger too. In order to make sure they are fulfilling their duties, every employee needs to put into practice everything that they’ve learned through their training. This includes things like misusing equipment, not wearing protective equipment and taking unnecessary risks. If they see any dangers they should be reporting it straight away. Whether it’s wiring near their desk, drawers have been left open or fire exits been blocked, you can’t physically have eyes and ears everywhere at once. This means your employees need to think of health and safety as part of their job role.

Ultimately you need to make sure you communicate and train your employees to practice the health and safety policies at all times, the above areas will help you to make sure they are following their duties.

Corporate Social Responsibility And The Benefits For Your Business

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. While businesses and corporations are independent entities which a policed by the federal government, there’s another force which can impact them, and that’s public image and perception. A poor public perception of your business can erode your customer base and profits. The following contributed post is entitled, Corporate Social Responsibility And The Benefits For Your Business.

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In today’s business world, there are generally four ways to demonstrate your social responsibility.

1. Environmentally, placing a focus on your carbon footprint and taking measures to run a greener company. We suggested some of the ways you can do this in one of our previous articles here at https://bigwordsarepowerful.com/.

2. Philanthropically, running a business that is either specifically geared towards helping others, as can be demonstrated by the IT company at https://www.itforedu.com/ who work to serve the schools in our communities, or by donating your time and money to local charities and community causes.

3. Ethically, by running a business that treats its employees and customers fairly and responsibly.

4. Economically, by growing your business to profit your employees, shareholders, and customers, as well as yourself. You might also create job opportunities that are available to the local community.

These are the four main strands of corporate social responsibility, and as a business owner, you owe it to yourself and your business to consider each one.

Why?

Well, there are some obvious benefits to your business if you do, and these are outlined below.

You will improve your public image. With a negative public image, your business would suffer. If you became renowned for treating your employees badly, for example, or if it could be proven that your business had a negative impact on the environment, you would receive both public and media backlash. You would then experience financial losses when consumers decided to ditch your business in favor of a more socially responsible company. Turn that around then and think of the improved perception of your business when you start taking steps to be more socially responsible.

You will improve your employee’s morale. Would you want to work for a company that operated unethically? We assume not, and we are guessing neither would your employees. If they had the knowledge that the company they worked for was making active steps to support the local community, they would have greater morale and job satisfaction. Their productivity would then increase, and that would profit your business. You might also attract the best hires, including those millennials fresh out of grad school looking to make a difference in the world.

You will have an advantage over your business rivals. By taking steps to demonstrate your social responsibility, you are going to attract more customers to your business. By doing those things that your competitors aren’t, such as donating some of your profits to a local charity and using more sustainable ways to package your products when shipping, you will establish yourself as a company that cares. If your rivals don’t follow suit, then they will struggle to gain the same public recognition and positive word of mouth that your business will receive.

You will feel happier getting out of bed in the morning. Knowing that you are making a difference in the world should give you an extra spring in your step. And even on your worst days in business, those days when you are tired, and problems seem insurmountable, you are more likely to persevere if you know that what you are doing actually means something to others, as well as to yourself.

Demonstrating your corporate social responsibility is not only good for others, but it’s good for business too. Today then, think about what you could do, and then start to action any plans that could benefit both your profit margin and the local community around you.

Let us know what you think, and if you have anything to add to this article, perhaps in the way of how to demonstrate social responsibility, please share your ideas with us.