Preventing Personal Injury Risks In The Workplace – TheLiberal.ie – Our News, Your Views

Preventing Personal Injury Risks In The Workplace




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Accidents happen, and that fact is never more true than when referring to workplaces. In industries like construction and manufacturing especially, the risk factors can be numerous and the responsibility of the business owner is to ensure their workers are trained, safe, and not at any sort of risk brought on by negligence. Despite that, the risk of personal injury is, at least legally speaking, always more to do with remediating risk, rather than assuming it can be removed entirely. 

For business owners, a personal injury claim, even when unsuccessful for a claimant, carries plenty of costs. The time taken to process a claim can run into months and the cost of hiring lawyers isn’t guaranteed to be placed on an unsuccessful claimant either.

The disruption and, more than likely, the loss of an employee and the impact of their claims against you can be detrimental, especially to smaller businesses. However, there are some clear and important steps you can take to cover your business’s liability for accidents and keep your employees safe in the process. 

Understand your position

It doesn’t hurt to explore the sorts of claims you might be liable for and resources are readily available online. Many small business owners have to wear a lot of hats in the early days. Being an accountant, employee, legal counsel, and HR professional all at once isn’t uncommon. As such, familiarising yourself with some of the most common reasons employees seek compensation for personal injury claims can shed some light on aspects of your business you might want to invest in training or insurance to help resolve risk.

Risk assessments are very common surveys, via which you can draw out actionable steps to lower risks to your employees. Fundamentally, a court case can see these sorts of steps and prove negligence was not the reason for an accident. 

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Day-To-Day  

The daily running of a business, in relation to injury risks, is about more than large training programs and expensive new equipment. Practical approaches to safe working conditions regardless of the industry can contribute to a much lower chance of accidents happening. Some simple steps to tweak culture can include doing away with a culture of ‘rushing.’ Time is of the essence for all sorts of businesses, but getting things done quick means often having to find shortcuts, which almost inevitably leads to accidents. 

Regular emergency drills, maintenance, inspections, a tidy workplace, and general culture of alertness are tangible ways to turn a workplace into a secure environment where people can focus on their roles, without the need to rush, avoid dangers, or worry that equipment isn’t going to work correctly. 

Retrospectives

As mentioned, things can go wrong. When they do, your procedure will likely include informing insurance companies, handling the situation with the employee to ensure their wellbeing and a host of other things. A great step to take is also learning from the mistakes that may have led to the incident. Even an employee’s personal error is a teachable lesson. Improving or focusing on training regimes can help lower reoccurrences.

Insurance companies will become less willing to fight cases on your behalf the more often they occur, and employees less likely to accept goodwill payments and rehabilitation time – outside of court rulings – if you have a reputation for this sort of thing happening and can’t demonstrate that their wellbeing is your priority. Any business owner owes their staff this, at least.  

At a high level, the best-case scenario for business owners in the occurrence of personal injury is to be able to have an employee return to work and the incident to not need to unravel and cause both parties to need to head to a courtroom for arbitration. A safe workplace is a happier one, certainly. But it’s also a far more sustainable one.  

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