The holidays are just around the corner, so naturally employees tend to have more distractions during these months more so than usual. Hosting out-of-town family members, planning dinners, purchasing gifts, scheduling out festive activities can easily cause people’s minds to drift while they’re working.
As stress, fatigue and rushing are all major contributions of accidents or other injuries year-round, it is important for employees to stay focused on the task at hand. From a health and safety perspective, it’s worth taking into consideration how these issues will affect workers on the floor, on site, on the road or at home.
Safety concerns can look like:
- Fatigue: due to extra tasks and responsibilities around this time of the year, people are more likely to be fatigued and as a result, this can create a big problem regardless of whether or not employees are engaging in high-risk work. It might be a good idea to consider having employees take longer breaks or even alter work schedules to help compensate for seasonal fatigue.
- Rushing and Frustration: in addition to holiday stress in employees’ personal lives, many industries face the busiest time of the year, so the added pressure in the workplace can definitely affect employees emotional state, which can lead to unintentional hazards, missing something vital, lack of patience with delicate procedures or employees becoming short tempered.
- Winter Hazards: it is important to note that safety doesn’t only apply to the workplace. Safety can become a state-of-mind and not an item on a to-do-list if employees are properly trained and the culture is strong in an organization. There are many sources available that outline most common holiday hazards as well as provide information on how to avoid them.
- Food safety: if your organization is having a holiday gathering, employees will most likely be bringing in dishes, so it is important to remind your employees to communicate their food allergies. Nobody wants to see anyone sick before the holidays, so be sure to stay mindful and take adequate precautions when ordering or storing party platters!
- Drunk and Drowsy Driving: work and family gatherings is often an opportunity for people to have a few drinks. It is imperative that nobody is allowed to get behind the wheel after consuming alcohol. No employer wants their workers involved in a car accident. To reiterate the issues of fatigue above, you should treat drowsy driving at the same level of conviction as drunk driving because it is also incredibly risky. The combination of a late night and a couple of drinks compounds the risk to disastrous levels.
Create and continue a safe and healthy environment for your employees not just during the holiday season, but year-round! Taking those extra precautions can really go a long way.