May 9, 2022
We're living in a time where security is as important as it ever has been, and yet so many business owners are lax on what it means to keep their employees safe. Safety isn't just about making sure that your employees don't sue you for some kind of defamation because they've been put at risk.
Safety is about ensuring that people can come to work and feel like they are motivated and excited to be there, while securing the knowledge that you care about what they do and how they do it. It's critical to implement effective safety measures in your workplace so that you can protect your workforce and make sure that your company's assets are safeguarded. More than anything, keeping your team safe is going to keep your company reputation intact.
People talk, and if you're the type of business that doesn't adhere to safety regulations or you're the type of business that is happy to disregard OSHA, then you're going to be the type of business that closes down very quickly. Keeping your team safe should be your number one priority as a business leader. This means having video surveillance in the stairways of your office building and having a well lit parking lot. It means having key cards so that you know exactly who is coming in and out of your building and when, and ensuring that you have a security guard at the front desk.
The more measures you have in place for safety, the more secure people feel when they come to work. Let's take a look at some office safety measures that you need to implement today.
The front desk of your building is going to be the one place that people have to come up against before they get to the offices or the people beyond. It's your first line of defence against any potential security threat. So you need to make sure that you have a robust visitor management system, a security guard who's able to patrol the area. And you need to have a secure and cohesive workplace, even with gated access.
If your visitor management system integrates seamlessly with your existing systems, you'll know exactly who's coming in and out of your business and when. You should also have somebody on the front desk to prevent any visitors from coming upstairs who are unwelcome.
If you have clients or visitors come to your office, or you even have outside personnel come to work in your office for the day, giving them the Wi-Fi code is common courtesy. However, the last thing you want to do is open any doors to potential security risks.
To be able to mitigate this, you can assign unique access codes to visitors who meet entry criteria. If you have people working from your office only once or twice a week, then having unique codes allows your Wi-Fi and your data to stay safe. This approach will ensure that you can provide Internet access to guests in the building without having to compromise the security of your network.
To keep your team safe you need to make sure that you have a cross reference for visitors against a block list. Preventing unwanted individuals from entering the premises is important, so utilise a visitor management system that screens visitors against custom block lists and third party watch lists.
It's a feature that will protect your workplace and allow you to keep visitor key cards deactivated if you have a disgruntled ex employee or an ex-client coming into the building. This is the feature that will protect both your people and your intellectual property while ensuring compliance with relevant standards all at the same time.
People come to work for you because they feel confident and calm in their environment. Keeping track of those who are present in your workplace is essential for maintaining your security and responding effectively to emergencies. If you don't know who's in your building and an emergency occurs, how do you know who to look for or if someone is missing?
You don't. In the event of an emergency, first responders will be able to quickly determine the number of people they need to assist if you have an active list of people who are on site at all times. A visitor management system can help you with this.
Your business should be well lit both inside and outside so that should anybody feel threatened or harmed, your cameras will be able to pick up the problematic individual. Parking lots outside of your business should be well lit the whole way. There should be no dark corners. There should be no areas where video surveillance cannot reach.
Stairwells should always have lights 24/7, and you should have lights on a backup system so that if the electricity happens to cut out, your lighting systems do not. Not only will this keep your employees safe, but it will mean that if anything does go wrong, you're not going to be looking blind at your video surveillance footage trying to find out who's at fault.
There are security standards and regulations that will apply to your industry, your environment and your location. Cross referencing compliance standards with OSHA, GDPR, and CCPA will help you to stay updated with changes to any regulations.
Not only do you want to maintain compliance to avoid a fine, but knowing that you are on top of workplace health and safety is going to lead you to feel more confident as an employer. It will also help you with your talent retention because people will feel safe when they come into work.
Every area of your office and your premises should be covered with video surveillance. If you have an outside smoking area, a rooftop garden, a car park, a stairwell, an emergency exit, a front door, a closed hallway, all of this needs to be tracked with video surveillance. There should be no blind spots, and anywhere that there is a potential blind spot should have a camera pointing at it.
Video cameras are not there to watch your employees and count how many minutes they spend in the bathroom. They are there to ensure that if somebody is attacked in the stairwell, you're able to follow up with the police and make everybody else feel safe while tightening your security measures. You can have a sign on your business to let people know that they are under surveillance, but you can also make sure that your cameras are small enough that people can't find them.
Implementing a emergency alert system enables multi channel fast communications during a critical situation. If the fire alarms are going off or if there's an earthquake locally, all employees and visitors will receive essential information in real time via email, push notification and SMS. Verifying that recipients have received the alerts and maintaining up to date contact information for your onsite personnel is vital for success.
Employees like to be active participants in maintaining their workplace security, and when you provide the right training, that's exactly what you can do. When you host training sessions on office safety and provide resources such as interactive maps to help them to navigate the workplace, people will feel confident and happy where they are working.
