In your transportation business, you have all sorts of employees who do all kinds of jobs. But whatever role they have, each of them has a right to be safe in their work, and this is a responsibility that you and they jointly share. However, as their employer you have to make sure that you are doing your part here, and as it happens there are quite a few things that you might need to bear in mind to ensure that you are doing just that.
Let’s take a look now at some of the things you can do to effectively ensure you are keeping your employees safe within your transportation business. As long as you are keeping on top of the following, you’ll find that their safety is much more assured, and that everyone feels a lot better for it in the workplace itself. Let’s take a look.
Hire Capable People
It actually makes a huge difference to first ensure that you are hiring capable people into your business. This helps not only with keeping that person safe, but with making sure that the whole team is kept as safe as possible too. And it is especially important when you are hiring people for those driving roles and other roles where safety is especially important. If you have a proper vetting process during your recruitment, then you are probably going to find that you end up with much more capable people, and that you are going to therefore have a safer workforce on the whole.
In other words, take care and don’t rush your process here. As long as you end up with the right people, you are going to find that it really does make a huge difference and that everyone is going to be a lot safer.
Take Care With Dangerous Goods
If you are in the business of transporting dangerous goods specifically, then you will need to be aware of a whole range of things that you are going to need to do in order to keep everyone as safe as possible and to follow along with the proper laws. There are quite a few things that you will need to think about here, and it would take more than this article to go through it all, so we will just discuss one of the major elements of it that you have to be aware of in particular.
That is the appointment of a Dangerous Goods Safety Adviser, or a DGSA. This is a member of the team you have to have if you are involved in this kind of transportation. This individual is to advise you as to the safest way to transport whatever it is you are transporting, and it’s a hugely important role to have in the team. You can hire externally for this, or you can put a member of your team through a DGSA training course. Either way, you’ll have to make sure you have one as soon as possible.
In general, of course, you should also make sure that you are taking care with the handling of those dangerous goods.
Maintain Your Vehicles
Your people are only as safe as your vehicles are, so you need to make sure that you are properly and fully maintaining your vehicles if you are keen on doing this right. The more fully maintained they are, the more likely it is that they are going to be safe to use, so this is something that you really need to think about here. In particular, take those vehicles for their regular service every now and then as required, and also ensure that you are fixing anything you need to as it happens.
If you can do that, it will mean that the vehicles your people are using are much safer, which will in turn keep the people safer. So this is a hugely important thing that you should make sure you are aware of.
Train Them Well
Finally, good training is always your friend when it comes to keeping your people safe. Make sure you have a regular training schedule for safety procedures, and that you learn it as well as possible and stick to it. This is going to mean that your people have all the necessary training up to date, ensuring that they can be much safer in the workplace overall. So this is absolutely essential for you to think about here.
