What Managers need to know about Personal Injury Claims
As a business owner, there’s probably one thing you should seriously think about before considering profits and reputation. Naturally, we refer to workplace accidents and how your business will deal with them when they happen!
Unlike many other things, you can’t simply wait for the unexpected to happen and deal with it on the spot – as such a thing may get you sued. Instead, you could, for example, work with a personal injury law firm and come up with a workplace accident management plan meant to keep both your business and employees completely safe!
Let’s take a look at some of the things you should already be doing to ensure that workplace accidents are properly managed!
Table of Contents
Injury Management Program
First of all, think about how you’d deal with an injured employee. Would you tell them to stay home, on unpaid leave, or fire them? Well, in some cases, you can’t do those things and, instead, you must facilitate their employment opportunities.
Naturally, this applies to employees injured on your business’ grounds.
Make sure to have such a program in place as it can help you better handle injury costs, workers’ compensation, as well as your employees.
Avoiding Common Accidents
Start by making sure that all common accidents can be easily avoided – such as slip and falls by placing more caution signs than usual, and so on. To better manage more serious accidents, it is essential that you never have to deal with minor/common ones.
First Aid Kits
Naturally, even if you’re certain that your business can avoid any accidents, you must keep a first aid kit within the workplace – and in plain sight as well.
Employees can get sick and may need immediate medical attention. As such, trained employees can help them until the medics arrive. In addition to the kit your employees need to know where a defibrillator is as well, if its available.
Emergency Action Plan
Every single employee should know how to find the emergency exits. You can make sure of this by practicing earthquake and fire drills, for example.
Many times, small businesses vanish off the market simply because they didn’t properly train their employees and didn’t respect specific emergency regulations.
Safe Item Storage
Another problem nowadays is that employees and business owners don’t consider item storage that much. As long as things are stored – they’re good! However, depending on the items that you have in stock, they may come with a fire hazard, for example – in the case of PC components.
Moreover, you should also make sure that items are evenly distributed – by weight – on shelves/cabinets so that they don’t fall and hurt someone.
The Bottom Line
Apart from the things mentioned above, you will also have to take note of any electrical hazards, limit the manual labor of your employees – depending on the area of your business. Make sure that the employees that may need additional help in an emergency are being considered, and reduce strain injuries and back pain.
In short, you’ll have to make the workplace of your employees – and home of your business – a safe haven for all scenarios and also make sure that your employees never have the chance to get injured, no matter what they’re doing and where!
