As an employer, it’s your duty to ensure that your employees are enjoying a conducive working environment.
This means providing clean welfare facilities and a working environment that is safe and healthy for all. Whether you own an SME or a large corporation, it’s your legal obligation to provide a sanitized workspace, good ventilation, natural lighting, breaks, and guidelines where manual handling is required. These, to mention but a few; can seem like a lot, but are the essential aspects that will maximize productivity and employee morale.
Additionally, you also need to recognize that working-age adults will spend nearly a third of their day while at work. In essence, the better facilities you provide to your employees, the easier it will be for your business operations. The facilities your company provides to your employees will have a huge impact on your employees and your business. While it’s crucial to provide your team with the best office perks, you’ll realize that it will also reflect well to your clients, suppliers, and partners and as a result, this will translate into boosting profit margins and customer retention. Let’s now take a look at why company facilities should always be a priority.
1. Promoting Health and Safety
Depending on the type of facilities allocated to your employees, the first step is to ensure that they are safe for everyone. Health and safety are key in any type of workplace environment because they help promote the wellness of all your employees. The most common workplace accidents happen as a result of poor safety and health standards in addition to poor maintenance of workplace facilities.
Workplace accidents such as muscle strains, collisions, cuts, lacerations, burns, exposure to hazardous substances, and slip and fall accidents, just to name a few, may result from poor facility maintenance. Although slip and fall accidents are often associated with senior citizens, Bart Kaplan of the Kaplan Lawyers law firm says that they can happen to anyone at any place where people are walking.
This means that providing the best company facilities will go a long way in protecting the health and safety of your employees. It could also reduce liabilities that may come from workplace accidents and health hazards while keeping your workers motivated for improved productivity, which brings us to the next important point.
2. Boosting Productivity
Now, to optimize your company’s performance, employee productivity is paramount. The design and layout of your company’s facilities can have a significant impact on encouraging collaboration, increasing productivity, and enhancing efficiency. Over the past few years, there has been an emphasis on the use of open-plan offices, state of the art workplace layouts, as employee welfare is carried with great weight. All these have to be in tandem with your business goals and ideologies if you want to realize full employee potential.
3. Compliance with Business Regulations
According to the statutory requirements and the division of licensing and worker protection, it’s imperative to provide your employees with a safe and sanitized facilities while at the same time protecting their welfare rights. The last thing you want is to find yourself and your business on the bad side of the law. The law requires all workplaces to be clean, safe, easily accessible, well maintained, and healthy to ensure seamless business operations. On this note, some facilities to provide to your employees should include:
- Clean drinking water
- Toilets
- Hand washing facilities
- Break and eating facilities
- Resting areas for ill workers
Depending on the industry you’re in, all-inclusive workplace facilities may include changing rooms, showers, seating areas, and ventilation. Failure to comply with business regulations such as safe and healthy company facilities could see you lose your business license, face tough labor law charges, or face workplace lawsuits as a result of workplace injuries. As a company, it’s important to comply with these regulations and in addition to this, you must satisfy the criteria used in passing a facility which may include holding licenses and permits for your facilities.
4. Illness Prevention
Clean, safe and healthy workplace facilities reduce injuries and illnesses. However, this can only be achieved by understanding the lurking hazards in your workplace facilities. On the same note, it’s important to train your employees about the health procedures and behaviors to practice while using the company facilities.
Truth be told, it will negatively affect your productivity every time an employee falls ill, and in addition to this, your bottom line will also experience adverse consequences each time you pay for work-related illnesses and injuries due to poor facility maintenance.
Company facilities implementation should, therefore, be on your top priority and you may need to go a mile further employing a facility manager to handle all the management aspects of your business’ facilities. This will provide you with more time to attend to other demanding matters of your business. This is a clear demonstration that your company takes pride in addressing health and safety obligations.
5. Improved Employee Retention Rate
When you prioritize your company’s facilities, you’ll be improving the workplace environment for your employees. This shows that you pay attention to employee welfare, a big reason why most employees will want to work in your company. Losing good employers will cost you a lot of money because it will affect your production and in addition to this, it takes time and money to recruit new employees.
Company facilities are an important tool for boosting morale and boosting job satisfaction. You’ll be surprised because this cuts both ways, both employee and customer retention. You, therefore, need to do your best to ensure that your employees are comfortable while at the workplace.
Now, as you can see, it pays to prioritize your company’s facilities. And as earlier mentioned, if you’ve been wondering whether your facilities are well managed, it pays to employ a facility manager.
This is because some facility management aspects require a hands-on approach and as a business owner, there’s a high likelihood you won’t have enough time for this. All the same, by improving the workplace experience, there will be a dramatic improvement in productivity and efficiency, among many other positive outcomes in your company.
