Safety Equipment For Your Business

Safety Equipment For Your Business

Once upon a time safety equipment for business simply meant PPE. These days, thankfully, thinks are more advanced, protecting workers and businesses. Health and safety should always be a significant concern for your business. Without an effective health and safety protocol, you’ll lose staff and open yourself up to the risk of tribunals and litigation.

With a husband who has worked in manufacturing/industrial workplaces as an electrical engineer for years, I know a fair bit about the need for more advanced safety equipment and measures. Here are a few things to consider but it is far from an exhaustive list.

Flying CCTV

If you run a business in the construction industry, you’ll know that it can sometimes be challenging to inspect your workers’ handiwork. In the old ways, the only way to access a job site was to climb up yourself and take a look. 

Flying CCTV drones are changing all that. You no longer need to climb to dangerous heights to prospect yourself. Instead, all you do is fly your drone-mounted camera to its desired position and then send the video feed direct to your devices, giving you a bird’s eye view, but without any of the danger. 

Safety Equipment For Your Business: Geofencing

Only authorised personnel must have access to the critical areas throughout your business. This is a safety issue and a security concern.

Geofencing is a brand new technology that allows you to replace regular locks and keys with smart locks and individual authentication. In many ways, geofencing makes your physical premises much more like your digital estate. You can set permissions in much the same way, granting access to who can and who cannot access various areas of your building. 

The level of customisation on these systems today is impressive. You’re often able to provide room-by-room level access to people, so long as you have the physical barriers in place to allow it. 

Machine Safety Sensors

With the rise of robots, companies need new safety technologies that will allow humans to work alongside machines. 

In the past, getting a machine to stop what it was doing if it bumped into a human was almost impossible. That’s why businesses kept the vast majority of robots in cages. It was too dangerous to work alongside them. 

With the invention of the piezo transducer, however, that all changed. You can now convert mechanic strain into electrical energy and then use that as a signal to stop the movement of robot arms. So, for instance, if a worker got in the way of a robot while it was performing a task, the robot would stop before resuming its operations. In short, it would behave much more like a person. Today, such robots exist, making work much safer for plant operatives. 

Safety Equipment For Your Business: Automated Activity Notification

CCTV cameras aren’t just useful for surveying but security too. Businesses are now making use of motion detection technology integrated via the internet to their devices. Owners can tell their cameras to send them alerts and live feeds whenever there is movement on their property. These kits then allow managers to call law enforcement in the event of a burglary. CCTV also enables management to check on productivity, safety and more. 

 

Accidents at Work

Once upon a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and before I decided to change careers and work for myself (about ten years ago), I worked in the health and social care sector. I had an incredibly rewarding role, working with some wonderful staff and service users and was fortunate that the place I worked was tip top when it came to health and safety.

One of my responsibilities was to risk assess…. Everything. I remember updating all personal, building and staff risk assessments myself before I left for maternity leave with my eldest and have vague nightmare-ish recollections of no fewer than ELEVEN stuffed large Lever Arch folders full of paper.

As it turns out I was very fortune to work for a company who were so “on the ball” with regards to both risk and who promoted top working conditions for staff, in what could be (by the nature of the work) a very challenging environment at times. Very fortune it would seem!

Research coming from Hayward Baker suggests that unsanitary and unsafe working conditions are putting millions of UK workers in danger, sometimes serious danger. At the end of the day, no matter how much we love what we do, we work to live, we don’t live to work and when we go to work there is an expectation that as an employee our personal safety and security should and will be safeguarded. Sadly, this isn’t always the case.

Have a look at the following infographic, supplied by Hayward Baker, alongside their new and easy to use injury compensation calculator, which has been put together to help victims of an accident at work figure out what compensation they may be entitled to.

Obviously, the pro-active approach would be to tackle health and safety concerns head-on by discussing these with your managers and going up the chain or even to the HSE if you have serious concerns about health and safety which you feel are not being addressed. In the (hopefully unlikely) event that you are injured however, it’s good to know that here may be funds that will help you during your recovery.