Starting a small business requires plenty of blood, sweat, and tears. However, you want to avoid those blood, sweat, and tears when it comes to your employees. Worker’s compensation claims can be costly in a number of ways, especially for a small business. So, let’s focus on reducing worker’s compensation claims for small business. But, remember, any business can follow these tips for a less accident-prone work, and we hope you will!
Avoiding Worker’s Comp Claims: Small Business Tips
Provide Proper Training for Health and Safety Protocol, and Provide Incentive
The key to keeping worker’s safe starts with having informed worker’s. Hosting a seminar once every few months, will keep safety protocol fresh in their minds. Identify common injuries, prevention, and hazards that fall into their line of work. Aside from prevention, it’s also important that you stress proper procedure, gear, and protocol for injuries.
Provide a Refresher, and Incentivize Safe Periods
While you want to prevent injury, you also want to make sure that employees are preparing for accidents that may come. Offer workshops, classes, safety seminars, and incentive. Make it 6 months without injury? Give your employees a little kickback. While financial incentives are any employees favorite— you could host a happy hour after work, buy them lunch one day, or give each person one paid day off at some point in time. The key is to encourage safety, but also incentivize it.
Provide Proper Screening At Time of Hire
Consider experience, adaptability, ability to learn quickly, and have them verbally solve a problem that might occur in the workplace. While you will provide training, new hires are always the most susceptible to injury because they’re not familiar with the way you do things. Depending on the type of business you run, they will have a number of different responsibilities. Make sure you are hiring proper candidates that will be able to perform job duties safely and will bring a diverse skill set to the team. As well as providing proper training.
Promote A Strong Manager From Within
As a business owner, you have a lot of responsibilities. That means you will likely have to hire someone to handle your worker’s from day to day while you handle the back-of-house stuff. While you might think the promoting your longest running employee is the way to go— consider other candidates. Hiring from within the company is always a good idea. Doing so encourages employees to work hard, show initiative, and empowers them to work hard and safe. Not to mention, those inside hires already know how the business works. Therefore, you can provide quicker, more efficient training on the job.
While you will be hiring someone else to take some responsibility, your engagement is extremely important
While you might not think this has anything to do with avoiding worker’s comp claims— it does. Good managers will keep worker’s in check, but your involvement keeps workplace morale at a high. Setting high standards, and making sure your employees respect you, as well as the workplace, prevents careless mistakes.
Anything can happen, and it’s important to remember that. But, a small business will be hit much harder by workplace accidents than a large corporation would. For a large company, the money that goes out for worker’s compensation will not hit quite as hard. So, hire smart and enforce the appeal of a safe work environment.