By the time the schools are back in September there are Halloween decorations for sale, Christmas starts soon after, and there are additional concerns that start to affect the Health, Safety and Wellbeing of your teams – especially if you are taking on temporary staff to cover the busy periods closer to the end of the year.
The approaching holidays can be an exciting and hectic time for employees and businesses. This season can also pose different risks related to the hospitality, entertainment, and retail industries. Discussing these risks with your employees and encouraging them to practise safe and healthy holiday habits can assist them in being proactive in addressing potential hazards and preventing common accidents and injuries.
Inform People can assist managers in keeping their facilities festive and safe during this joyous and hectic time of year. Let’s discuss holiday safety topics tips, and we will provide critical points you can cover with your employees to promote safety at work.
Why is it important to address holiday health safety topics in the workplace?
As a manager or leader in your company, you must address holiday safety topics in the workplace to keep your employees safe. The holiday season can bring about new hazards that your team members may not be aware of. By identifying potential hazards, you can raise your employees’ awareness of these issues, prompting them to take precautions to avoid accidents and injuries.
Discussing safety issues at work demonstrates to employees that you care about them. It’s a way to show your team members how much you care about their health. Employees who feel seen and supported by their employers are more likely to be engaged and loyal to their employers. A healthy staff can help maintain morale during the busy holiday season.
With that being said, a relevant safety audit can help your organisation too. A safety audit is a thorough, impartial assessment of a company’s or organisation’s health and safety programme, procedures, and processes. Safety audits provide information on a safety programme’s effectiveness, completeness, and dependability. You probably have some in place for weekly and monthly checks – but do they truly cover the additional risks imposed by the extra footfall of seasonal visits, the impact of winter weather, extra decorations, or the changes in stock such as fireworks?
The Importance of Conducting Safety Audits during the Holiday seasons
A safety audit aims to determine compliance with Health and Safety at Work concerning workplace and employee safety. The first step of business is to provide evidence of compliance, but safety audits can also help you to:
- Identify workplace risks, as well as their severity and whether the highest levels of controls are in place.
- Identify the advantages and disadvantages of safety processes and procedures.
- Show where and how recommended improvements should be made.
- Determine that adequate resources are available to manage workplace health and safety and that those resources are used efficiently and effectively.
- Determine whether safety processes and procedures are legally compliant. Eliminate unsafe practices and hazards.
8 Seasonal Safety Tips worth revisiting annually
How Inform People Can Help in Building a Safety Framework
Every organisation needs an agile process to continuously improve employee safety, create digital records for regular maintenance, and maintain productivity while complying with regulatory requirements. Inform People helps businesses build a scalable, flexible, and configurable audit management workflow.
With Virtual PA management software, organisations can:
Proactively Reduce Number of Incidents
Automate your health and safety workflows to reduce incidents and enable continuous improvement. Empower employees to report incidents or near-misses as they happen. Virtual PA management software assists organisations in planning and executing their audit processes. The system enables a disciplined approach while also ensuring compliance.
Streamline and Automate the Process, With Proven Best Practices
Inform People’s accurate, secure management software helps with audits and reports across business units, sites, and worldwide. Digital reports and regulatory forms ensure compliance and data accuracy.
Manage paperwork
Virtual PA reduces paperwork by gathering critical information digitally and allowing auditors to record findings, detailed observations, and recommendations during the audit execution stage. This eliminates inconsistencies and errors by standardising data collection and provides managers with visibility by closely tracking each document.
Improve collaboration
Several health and safety leaders believe an enterprise-wide safety culture won’t be possible until everyone thinks about metrics. The Virtual PA software includes a user-friendly, intuitive portal for reporting regular and ad-hoc safety observations. Help teams and key stakeholders collaborate with a “system of collaboration.” Provide positive reinforcement, where a successful safety action is appreciated and noted.
Improve quality control and performance
Virtual PA software streamlines both internal and external assessments, helps in event planning, training, and documents, identifies non-conforming areas, reports risks, ensures risk management and monitoring.
Ensure the Above Holiday Safety Tips are Embraced and Consider Other Business Safety Needs
In addition to the holiday safety tips above, every organisation should have a year-round health and safety plan. It is the employer’s responsibility to ensure that their employees are safe, not only during holidays. Inform People provides robust management software to assist retail, hospitality, and the entertainment industry in performing timely inspections and maintenance in the workplace to ensure the safety of their employees and business site. Our cloud-based software streamlines the process, eliminates the need for costly paper-based inspections, and provides real-time data with on-demand reports.
The above are just some of our holiday tips. If you have any specific concerns or want to find out more, talk to us.
