It’s fair to say that not every workplace is created equal, and as a result of these each one poses its own risks and challenges.
So, while it’s imperative that factory staff are fully insured and equipped to operate heavy machinery safely, office must be managed by occupational health teams and laid out to minimise the risk of overcrowding.
However, there are some challenges that remain universal to most or all workplace environments, with the safeguarding of employees and the need for comprehensive insurance offering prominent examples.
In this post, we’ll appraise the main challenges facing the typical workforce in 2020, while asking what steps businesses and entrepreneurs can take to overcome these.
While workplace fatalities in the UK are relatively rare and synonymous with a select few industries (such as agriculture and forestry), they remain a significant concern for businesses across multiple sectors.
According to HSE, there were a total of 147 fatalities in Great Britain throughout 2018/19, with this number having increased incrementally by six from the previous year.
Such an increase could be explained by natural variation, of course, while the number of fatalities in the workplace have remained largely unchanged in recent years.
However, the key for employers is to understand the most common causes of workplace fatalities and identify which ones are most pertinent to them, before conducting a comprehensive (and ideally third-party) risk assessment that provides actionable solutions going forward.
In some respects, workplace injuries (including instances of stress) can prove even more problematic for employers, especially when you consider that 626,000 injuries occurred at work during 2017/18.
This is certainly undermining workplace productivity in the UK, while absenteeism is currently causing businesses to lose 6.9 days a year per employee at a cumulative cost of £100 billion.
While risk assessments help to reduce instances of workplace injury and stress, however, it’s almost impossible to eliminate these cases completely due to factors such as human error. With this in mind, you should definitely take out comprehensive third-party insurance that safeguards employees and provides financial protection for all parties in the worst-case scenario.
This type of insurance also protects employees who provide primary and urgent care to patients, with firms such as Arthur J. Gallagher offering specialist coverage in such instances.
Increasingly, the factors that motivate us to work are becoming more diverse, with contemporary employees more likely to focus on their working conditions and benefits packages rather than the bottom line salary on offer.
With this in mind, businesses are having to ensure that they formulate the best benefits packages to their employees, while also taking care to include a number of different options to help enhance an individual’s quality of life.
So, in addition to including basic elements such as sick leave and holiday, you should consider offering discounted gym memberships with local firms to help enable employees access a superior work-life balance.
You should also consider the flexible working directive in the UK, and try to offer employees as much as flexibility around their contracted hours to create a scenario where you’re comfortably able to retain your top talent.
