To protect the safety of all staff and employees, every business should conduct workplace emergency drills on a regular basis. Employees are a company’s greatest asset, and their wellbeing should always be the number one priority.
Without a doubt, investing in PPE from brands like Zoro to protect employees is important. But to make sure everyone can respond to emergency situations in a safe and correct manner, performing regular safety drills should also be a must when it comes to workplace emergency preparedness.
Here are three useful tips to help your organization develop an effective emergency drill to ensure everyone’s safety.
Conduct Tabletop Exercises
Full-scale emergency drills can be overwhelming and stressful due to the number of actions and factors involved, especially if employees are not familiar with them. In this case, conducting tabletop exercises might be helpful in allowing everyone to understand their responsibilities. Also, tabletop exercises are a cost-effective way to allow all staff and employees to validate plans before conducting an actual safety drill.
Establish Metrics and Compare Final Results
Without proper success and comparison metrics, it’s difficult to compare drill performance results in an objective way. Having these metrics in place is vital in helping your company analyze and gather valuable data.
For instance, if the objective is to decrease employees’ response time to emergency alarms, then each response time should be accurately documented and analyzed after each practice. This way, your team can have a better understanding of what needs to be improved, and be more intentional about the next drill performance.
Don’t Announce Emergency Drills
The main purpose of conducting workplace safety drills is to ensure that each employee is capable of remaining calm and collected in unexpected situations, and perform proper safety procedures to ensure everyone’s safety. If each emergency drill were announced beforehand, then employees would not have the chance to actually experience the sense of urgency and uncertainty of real emergencies.
Though planning surprise emergency drills might take some extra thought, the effort will be worth it in the long run.
Emergency Checklist Link:
https://res.cloudinary.com/dh47lnicu/image/upload/v1619816036/emergency-drill-report-checklist_1.pdf
