4 Great Tips To Prevent Falls At Your Workplace

Preventing falls at your workplace is essential to protecting your employees and customers, and ensuring your business avoids costly lawsuits. Thankfully, there are a number of steps you can take to keep your employees safe and prevent customer falls. Here are 4 tips to ensure falls and accidents are avoided at your business.

Reduce Slippery Surfaces

Water and ice are two major factors leading to workplace falls, and often result from a sloppy policy surrounding these hazards. You will want to make sure every area of your workplace is protected, including areas such as sidewalks and parking lots.

You can reduce wet floors by placing moisture-absorbing mats near the entrances and exits of your workplace and placing "wet floor" signs where needed. You can also put rubber mats around areas where floors are often wet to provide workers with extra traction.

Also think about what kind of floors you want in your business. Linoleum and other smooth types of floors are easier to clean than carpets, but carpets are usually much more difficult to take a fall on. You can also put traction strips on each step of your stairwell in order to reduce potentially dangerous falls on stairs.

Additionally, you should ensure that parking lots are regularly salted and deiced when such conditions are present.

Ensure Your Workplace is Properly Lighted

Dark stairwells, unlit corners and low lighting levels can lead to dangerous conditions. Many businesses suffer from poor lighting, especially in areas like basements or storage areas where slips and falls can happen. Giving your workers a brightly lit office may not only reduce slips, but it can also increase worker productivity as well.

Keep A Clean Workplace

If you run a business, you know it's easy to quickly create a messy and disorganized workspace. Warehouses that don't properly organize inventory, retail businesses where products pile up in aisles, and manufacturing facilities where vehicles are whizzing by and machinery is left improperly attended—all of these scenarios present a falling hazard, and a potential lawsuit.

You should ensure good housekeeping practices, and devote extra training for workers about the importance of keeping a neat and well organized workplace. You can also increase worker accountability by ensuring each worker knows what tasks and areas of your workplace they are responsible for.

Be Clear About What Footwear Is Expected

You should examine your floor types and the overall layout of your workplace to ensure your employees are wearing the proper type of shoes, especially if physical labor is involved. If you want workers to wear steel-toed boots with good treads to increase traction, then you should make this your official policy at work. If a worker suffers a slip or falls while wearing improper footwear, you can better protect your business from liability.

Ultimately, workers and customers may have a strong case against your company if you fail to take the proper precautions against falls at your workplace. Implementing these suggestions can go a long way to protecting you, but when confronting a lawsuit, it's important to ensure you retain a quality lawyer like Hagelgans and Veronis that knows how to defend your business interests.