Keeping Your Team Safe and Secure While Working For You

Small business owners may work hard, but they can’t do absolutely everything themselves. Running and maintaining a successful business will take multiple individuals, each specialising in different areas, combining and working together to share their knowledge, come up with ideas and generally keep the business ticking over.

Of course, when you take on a team, you also take on a fair amount of responsibility. You’re going to find that you need to take care of the employees that are working for you, keeping them safe and providing them with everything that they need to thrive in your workplace and their role. This is easier said than done, but it is essential to your business’ operations and progression. So, here are a few things you can do to keep your staff as safe as possible at all times.

Health and Safety

When you run a business, health and safety will become extremely important and a pivotal point of your business’ operations and progression. There are a number of reasons you need to be invested in health and safety at work. These include:

• Basic Morals – your staff are the individuals who are keeping your business up and running. Without them, your business wouldn’t be able to operate and you’d experience struggles and a lack of progression. They’re building your fortune on your behalf. You need to make sure that you’re caring for them while they do this. 
• Laws, Rules and Regulations – health and safety is implemented by law in many countries now. This is to ensure that you keep your team healthy and safe and that you will face consequences (legal and financial) if you fail to do this. This is in the greater public interest and helps maintain safe and responsible workplaces. 
• Productivity – a healthy team is a productive team. If your staff members experience illness or injury as a result of their work, they will need to take time off to recover, causing problems for you and your business’ workload in the short term or even the long term.

There are plenty of areas of health and safety that you can – and will have to – focus on when it comes to running a business with employees. But for now, here are a few that you might want to prioritise. These include:

• Fire Safety – make sure that your building is fire safe. Provide fire extinguishers and fire blankets where necessary. Also ensure that fire exits are clearly labelled and sign posted.
  
• Wet Floors – invest in wet floor signs and ensure that your team know to put them out as soon as any wet patches are discovered. This will prevent slips and trips. 
• Warning Signs – many commercial premises pose threats that cannot be altered, such as low ceilings or single steps. Label these with warning signs to prevent people from hurting themselves on them. 
• Ergonomic Furniture – if your team are sitting at a desk a lot, you should make sure that they have ergonomic furniture and equipment. This can prevent conditions such as repetitive strain injury. You can get ergonomically designed desks, chairs, keyboards, back rests, footrests and more.
  
• First Aid Kits and Supervisors – make sure that your workplace has basic first aid kits at hand, as well as individuals trained in first aid. 
• PAT Testing – this form of testing will ensure that all electronic devices are suitable for use and not a threat to your team. It should be carried out regularly.

Covid Measures

Of course, we are living in a time with a unique threat that many of us didn’t know how to deal with prior to its outbreak – coronavirus and Covid-19. Sure, many people are now vaccinated and restrictions are being loosened. But you should still take measures to protect your team from this contagious, viral disease. Implement measures that will help to keep them safe from Covid. This could include work from home policies, where they don’t need to return to the office unless they are comfortable doing so. It could include social distancing in small spaces within your office. It could mean providing hand sanitiser, one way systems, perspex barriers between desks and more. It’s always good to talk to your team about how they’re feeling and what you can do to help them further in this situation.

Cybersecurity

Nowadays, more and more employees are operating online. If you have a team that works from computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones, you’re going to have to make sure that they are aware of cybersecurity and that they are thoroughly trained in staying cyber safe. There are a number of ways that you can achieve this. First, make sure you conduct regular network penetration testing to see where the weak spots are in your system. Then tackle these, either with your team, or a professional IT expert. Next, you can make sure that they’re fully trained in cybersecurity. Making sure people are aware of what cybercriminals do, what they are aiming to achieve and the common methods they use will help to significantly reduce the risk of cybersecurity.

You can also make sure that you put measures in place to prevent cyberattacks on your employees’ devices. Azure Virtual Desktop security is a good place to get started. Then you may also want to consider installing a VPN, or “virtual private network”, which is easy for your team to sign into, but makes hackers’ lives a lot more difficult.

Personal Support

Sure, you should not delve into your employees’ personal lives. But there are ways that you can help and support them through personal hardships and struggles. If a team member is having personal difficulties or a hard time at home that they need time to overcome, you should make sure to provide them with paid compassionate leave. This will give them the opportunity to resolve problems and keep themselves in a safe and positive environment where they don’t have to worry.

As you can see, there are various approaches you can take to keep your team safe and secure at work. Hopefully, the information above will help you with a few different areas of focus that will help you to achieve your goals!