5 Tip for Improving Occupational Hygiene

You can’t be too careful when it comes to maintaining safety at your workplace. Whether you’re an employer, business owner or occupational safety professional, an effective occupational hygiene routine is essential. This is to protect both your employees and members of the public that could be exposed to risks that arise from your business operations. 

However, as your business grows you’ll be faced with the challenge of improving your occupational hygiene routine. This is due to having increased operations. 

The more your business grows, the more risks it will present. The best way is to review it regularly.

If you want to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to make your workplace as safe as possible,  keep reading to learn. Here are 5 useful tips to improve the occupational hygiene in your business.

Establishing An Effective Occupational Hygiene Routine

Your occupational hygiene routine should directly address the risks that are present from your business processes. The most effective ways are:

1) Collect Information Using Risk Analysis Tools

Form a quantitative analysis using occupational hygiene risk tools. This will allow you to identify the various hazards that are present in your workplace. 

The three main components of risk analysis are as follow: 

Identify the risks that are present. – They could be radiological, chemical, physical or different in nature.

Perform a risk analysis. – Gather data on the frequency and severity of identified risks.

Categorise your risks – Establish acceptable levels of risks, targets and thresholds, and implement safety controls on high-risk areas

Doing this periodically will ensure that the control measures taken are re-tested for effectiveness. Also, any new hazards that arise as your business grows are accounted for.

2) Create Similar Exposure Groups 

Doing this will allow you to create a unified safety plan for all your employees. Similar Exposure Groups (SEGs) address a particular hazard and how it may affect various groups of people. The factors that will help you measure risk levels that different groups are exposed to include job roles, processes, locations, demographics and other relevant factors.

Some things you need to address when forming SEGs:

• Unplanned and Infrequent Events
  
  This can include anything from natural disasters to chemical spills or equipment malfunction.
  
  
• Diversity of Tasks
  
  Factor in the environmental and ergonomic impact that various roles and job tasks can have on your workers.
  
  
• Collaboration or Crossover of Job Tasks
  Collaboration is required when completing a job that requires various skill sets. This may suggest that the job task is not straightforward. Furthermore, it could present several additional hazards that you will need to take into account.
  

Getting this information together allows you to form a comprehensive safety plan. Processes for sampling, monitoring and testing should be included. This allows your plan to further strengthen its effectiveness.  You can use this data to calculate and compare your operations with various thresholds and targets. 

3) Track Your Records Of Assets, Calibration And Maintenance 

ISO standards necessitate the recording of assets and having a system in place for calibration and maintenance. This is to control the production and maintenance of equipment and products.

Besides being a requirement, tracking your equipment is also an essential step in improving employee safety. Having automated processes in place helps to keep an accurate record of the condition of your equipment and machinery. 

Workplace injuries caused by equipment can be avoided with an automated process that reminds your staff when your equipment is in need of routine maintenance. It can also be used to alert the relevant person when incidental maintenance or repairs are required.

4) Automate And Integrate Employee Training 

All your other efforts in improving occupational hygiene are redundant if they’re not being put into use by your employees. Training your employees is essential to ensure that they are well-informed and accountable. As a result, your workplace should become a much safer place.

Integrate training of your new processes with your existing occupational hygiene practices. This means that whenever there is a new process or an existing one changes, your employees will be notified automatically for training and testing. 

This ensures that your processes for training and testing are well coordinated and that your new processes fits in well with other aspects of your safety plan. 

5) Regular Inspections 

Finally, conducting regular inspections is useful in enforcing new processes and regulations that your employees may have yet to comply with. This is because they are new and often take some time to become habitual. 

Inspections are a fundamental part of a successful occupational hygiene program in any workplace and your business will definitely benefit from routine checks.