How to Keep Your Employees Safe in Your Lab

January 19 2020 - The safety of employees is a primary concern for any business, but those concerns are amplified when working in a lab. There are safety risks at any place of work, but if they're not properly managed, those risks can be much greater in a laboratory.

From simple slips and trips to hazardous chemicals, there are plenty of risks for employees in a lab, so it's important to work hard to limit those risks. Simple risk management planning can greatly reduce the chances of an employee having an accident in your lab, helping to make your work environment safer for everyone.

When planning how to keep your employees safe in your lab, make sure you consider these four important points.

Have a Safety Manual

Creating a safety manual is a good way of codifying your expectations and giving employees a handy reference point for safety standards. Once you've created a safety manual, you can incorporate it into your new employee induction sessions and make sure everyone is familiar with it.

Not only does this help make employees aware of their safety obligations, but it can also limit your liability if an accident does occur. Make sure your employees understand the manual and have signed up to it, and you can make safety in your lab a priority.

Make Sure You're Maintaining Your Equipment

Maintaining your equipment and making sure you’ve got the right safety equipment is a key part of keeping employees safe in your lab.

You always want your machinery to be working at 100% anyway but making sure it's working properly is also key for safety. Use a company like MA controls to help you with the maintenance of your equipment and ensure optimal performance, reliability, and safety.

Keeping the right safety equipment isn’t always cheap, but it's well worth the safety of your employees, so make sure you check your equipment regularly and keep it in good working condition.

Routine Safety Drills

If accidents do happen, your employees must know what action to take, and the best way to do this is through practice. Of course, you want to focus on prevention, but sometimes accidents happen, and how people react to them can make all the difference.

Work out what the biggest risks are in your lab and allow your employees to practice for the events that are most likely to happen by organizing routine safety drills. They're not everyone's idea of fun, but the time spent doing safety drills can be invaluable in the event of a real-life emergency.

Take Care of the Basics

Following basic safety procedures can help limit most safety risks associated with working in a lab. Make sure you're reinforcing your safety manual and giving employees the tools; they need to follow procedures.

Simple rules like no food and drink in the lab, cleaning up spills, and looking out for trips hazards are there for a reason, but it's easy for people to become complacent and not adhere to them. Make sure you continue to emphasize the importance of these basic rules of making the lab a safer place for people to work.

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