Proper fall protection is essential in industrial facilities in order to protect employees. Passive fall protection devices like an industrial swing gate, egress stair gate, or modular safety rail systems play a key role in preventing potential job-related accidents.
However, even if you know OSHA guidelines backward and forwards and have invested in OSHA-Compliant fall protection measures and devices, this does not mean that an accident can’t occur at your facility. The fact is that common mistakes people make on the job every day can leave companies vulnerable to having an accident occur in their facility. To help ensure that you are able to provide a safe work environment for your employees, keep reading for a look at the most common indoor fall protection mistakes companies make and how you can avoid them.
1.) Insufficient Protective Barriers
When it comes to keeping your employees safe from falls, passive protective measures can be critical in helping you to maintain OSHA compliance. In particular, raised surfaces where employees will be walking or working need to have guardrails to help prevent them from falling and being injured. Not only is this essential for employee safety, but it is also an OSHA requirement. OSHA requires that all “employer(s) must ensure that each employee on a walking-working surface with an unprotected side or edge that is 4 feet or more above a lower level is protected from falling.”
In order for guardrails to meet safety standards, they should be 42 inches (plus or minus 3 inches) above the walking surface, and they need to be able to withstand a force of at least 200 pounds without failing. Installing insufficient protective barriers is one of the biggest fall protection mistakes companies make. Guardrails that do not meet the required height or strength requirements will put your employees at risk and could cause you to incur fines from OSHA, making it crucial that you install OSHA-compliant guardrails on all raised surfaces.
2.) Insufficient Training
Even if you have a great fall protection plan and have invested in OSHA-compliant fall protection equipment, they may not be effective if your employees do not know how to use this equipment. One of the biggest mistakes employers make is not providing sufficient fall protection training to new employees.
Any worker who could be exposed to a fall should receive training before they even start working in an elevated area. This training should educate employees on indoor fall protection systems and policies, ways to use and choose protective devices, and how to clean and preserve fall protective equipment. Training all employees on your company’s indoor fall protection systems, including re-educating existing employees on a regular basis, ensures that everyone at your company knows what they need to do in order to minimize fall hazards.
3.) Failing to Inspect Equipment Regularly
Just because you’ve installed fall protection devices and trained your employees on their use, this does not mean that you can get complacent. In order to ensure that your indoor fall protection equipment is effective, it needs to be inspected regularly for signs of failure or damage. Make it a part of your employees’ routines to visually inspect passive fall protection systems for signs of weaknesses or failure at least once a week.
Additionally, you should have all of your company’s fall protection devices professionally inspected every six months in order to ensure that they are still structurally sound and do not need to be replaced. The fact is that your equipment will experience wear and tear over time, which can cause damage and compromise its effectiveness. It is then critical that your safety equipment is inspected regularly in order to ensure your employees are properly protected.
4.) The Right Protection Isn’t Offered
One of the biggest fall protection mistakes businesses make is not providing sufficient protective measures to ensure employee safety. While companies may think that the investments they have made are sufficient to provide a safe workplace, it is easy to overlook certain areas of fall prevention, which can put workers at risk. In particular, companies often overlook passive fall protection measures that can be critical in preventing falls, particularly in areas where active fall protection is not in use.
This is why it is so important that companies perform safety audits and reviews on a regular basis. These audits can be critical in helping companies to identify gaps in their fall prevention measures and create a plan to correct these issues, which is essential in maintaining OSHA compliance and creating a safe work environment. Regularly testing fall protection equipment can also go a long way in helping you to find gaps in your fall prevention systems by helping you identify systems that aren’t suited to the hazards present on a given job site.
5.) Equipment is Improperly Deployed
In some cases, while all of the right safety equipment is available for workers to use, this equipment will not be installed or deployed properly, increasing the risk of a system failure. Even if you invest in the best fall protection systems, these devices can go to waste if they are not installed/used correctly. This makes it critical that you have all of your fall protection systems tested regularly in order to ensure that they are providing proper fall protection.
This also highlights the importance of regularly retraining employees on the use of fall protection systems in order to ensure that they know how to properly install and use fall protection equipment to ensure a safe work environment.
Making sure that you have indoor fall protection devices in place such as an industrial swing gate, egress stair gate, or modular safety rail systems is essential in order to reduce the risk of injury at your facility. However, the reality is that even with the right fall protection equipment, mistakes are common and can put your staff in harm’s way. To help reduce the risk of falls at your company, feel free to contact us to learn more about steps that you can take to protect your employees.
