When it comes to safety concerns in the workplace, the list goes on and on. There are dozens of variables to keep track of at all times, and this can be an exhausting endeavor for any manager or site owner. However, approaching safety concerns in the workplace by prioritizing the most common issues first will help keep your place of work as safe as possible for the majority of your workers.

Safety has about as many facets as there are entries in the dictionary, but a lot of the work of EHS revolves around one thing: identifying and controlling hazards.

For most companies, the path to identifying and mitigating workplace hazards usually begins with a workplace inspection. How else can you find out all of the potential hazards that must be addressed? Of course, every workplace inspection must be conducted in an efficient manner to ensure that everything has been sufficiently identified. If you cut corners or do something the wrong way, you’ll be doing your company and your employees a disservice.

As with just about anything else, workplace health and safety often require a proactive approach. You never want to wait for something to go wrong and then act. By then, you’ll have experienced a workplace accident that could have been prevented.

There should be no debate about the importance of occupational health and safety in the workplace. It takes on particular importance for companies that operate in the manufacturing and construction industries. In these industries, safety needs to be taken seriously and companies need to be extra thorough in their approach.

For companies in some industries, health, safety, and the environment (HSE) are such prominent concerns that they require specialized workers to oversee these areas. After all, it’s not always about making a profit. Companies also have a responsibility to protect the health and safety of employees, which is why an HSE site specialist is sometimes needed.

Your company thinks of safety as your foremost priority. After all, when your employees form the backbone of your work, you can’t afford not to protect your most important asset.

When you’re planning your workplace safety program, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers. You want to reduce accidents by X amount, you want to record Y participation numbers in a given safety training. But if you don’t have a safety strategy when you start the planning process, you may well lose the forest for the trees.

Workplace safety: it goes without saying how absolutely crucial it is to the day-to-day functioning of your business. It’s in your vested interest to keep your facilities in good shape and your employees aware of any possible dangers so that you can avoid the kind of dangerous, potentially life-threatening accidents that can derail an entire company’s ability to be productive.

Building a successful safety program is only half the battle. Once you’ve built a program you can be proud of, you have to make sure it stays that way. As Warren Buffet once quipped, it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it, and the same thing can be said of your safety program.