June Is Safety Month – How Are You Keeping Yourself and Your Coworkers Safe?
June is National Safety Month, a time when professionals and companies focus on improving their workplaces to prevent accidents and injuries. While safety is often considered an employer’s responsibility, employees are a critical part of the equation.
By taking the right steps, you can do your part to keep yourself and your coworkers safe. If you want to know how you can help, here are some tips.
Practice Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is the act of ensuring you’re fully apprised of what’s occurring around you. By remaining vigilant and being hyperaware of your surroundings, you can identify potential dangers before they cause harm. Similarly, by being highly aware of how your actions impact the environment, you can ensure you don’t move forward in a manner that could hurt yourself or others or create hazardous situations.
Make a habit of scanning your environment, particularly if you need to navigate through it or are about to complete a potentially dangerous task. Ensure not only that you’re acting in a safe manner but that others moving into your workspace aren’t accidentally ending up at risk. If you spot an issue, don’t proceed until it’s addressed. That allows you to reduce the odds of accidents, all through awareness.
Always Report Unsafe Conditions
Employers typically do their part to maintain a safe workplace. Along with providing training, they’ll outline expectations, develop policies, display informational posters, make documentation available, and more.
Additionally, managers will work to spot safety issues whenever possible, allowing them to intervene. The challenge is that managers can’t be in all places at once. Since that’s the case, they may not encounter a problem as quickly as you do.
Ultimately, the company can’t fix issues if they don’t know there’s a problem. By reporting unsafe conditions, you alert the proper people to situations that need addressing, allowing the appropriate action to be taken quickly.
Ensure Proper Care for Yourself and Others
Many work environments and roles are physically challenging. If your job is strenuous, make sure you prioritize your care. Take your breaks as scheduled, allowing you to rest. Make hydration a priority, and ensure you always use any personal protective equipment (PPE) that helps you remain safe.
Additionally, learn to spot the signs of fatigue and exhaustion, both in yourself and others. That allows you to identify potential problems before they become worse, ensuring either you or a manager can intervene. Also, make sure that others are wearing their PPE.
Ultimately, workplace safety isn’t just your employer’s responsibility. Every employee should work to do their part. That ensures everyone is watching out for their own well-being, as well as allows each person to have their colleagues’ backs, decreasing the odds that accidents and injuries will occur.