Continuing our popular safety at work series, this week Donaghey Safety Training give businesses a few tips on avoiding personal injury claims from busy shopping at Christmas.
The Christmas rush will soon be upon us, ‘Black Friday’ will signal the start of the helter-skelter Christmas shopping season.
From now until the 24th of December you can be sure your shops and retail outlets will be packed full of busy shoppers all looking for the ‘must have’ gift.
But after the Christmas rush passed last year and you had time to breath were you one of the unfortunate retailers? Were you left counting cost rather than profit?
Every January Retailers across ROI are hit with claims for personal injury sustained during the Christmas shopping period.
Darren Donaghey
How as a business owner can you prevent accidents happening?
Below I have a list of simple things that you can do in your shop or retail outlet to reduce the risk of accident.
1. Slips, trips and falls, Slips, trips and falls account for a huge number of accidents in retail each year, they are however so easy to prevent.
• Ensure aisles are free of clutter and other tripping hazards.
• Provide cleanup supplies at convenient locations in the facility.
• Place water-absorbent mats near entrances and areas where water, ice or snow may be tracked onto the floor.
• Train employees on identifying and preventing slip, trip and fall hazards.
2. Ergonomics
When laying out displays or stacking items, try to imagine how busy the shop is going to be, try to imagine the flow of people through the building, in particular avoid;
• Placing large stands directly inside the door of the shop
• Placing displays at choke points in the shop
• Try and guide the traffic around the store in the way you want, particularly at checkouts and point of sale terminals, use crowd control tape to create queues to control customers rather than a big mob pushing for the exits
• It may also be an idea to use a quota system for entry, nothing says a busy store than a short queue outside!!
3. Staff
Train staff to be proactive, the more proactive the staff are the better, place floor staff in choke points and empower them to direct customers around the store, this will help the flow of traffic.
More staff on the floor also means that those spills or knocked over displays can be quickly cleaned up before they become a problem.
The most important thing any of us as business owners can do is limit our exposure to risk. Take the proactive steps before there is a problem, If you are unsure of how to control your risk then talk to an expert.
