When you do work for your contracting business, it’s common to follow the standard safety practices for each task. If you know that you are taking each step seriously, you can avoid injury and ensure that you get to the finish line with as little hassle as possible. However, there are other aspects of your business or personal safety that you might not think about as often. Here are five to remember.

Jobsite Security
If you’re working as a contractor on a jobsite, you need to make sure that the site will be safe and secure while you are there. It’s also important to consider how secure the site will be, if you have to leave equipment and materials for the day. Ask the property owner about security features of the site, including:

• Fences
• Surveillance equipment
• Locked doors and gates
• Pest deterrents

Protection is important, and you want to make sure that somebody is attending to it. You don’t want to enter the jobsite and find an unfamiliar person any more than you would like to find a snake or a mountain lion.

Construction Vehicle Safety
When you think about safety, it’s tempting to focus on the safety tasks you need to complete onsite, whether that’s a client property or your own workspace. But you should also think about the safety of the transportation you take to get to and from work, especially if you use your own vehicle. Many people find that they forget about vehicle upkeep, until something breaks. Schedule regular maintenance for your work vehicle, and more often if you use it to travel to client sites regularly. Replacing the brakes when appropriate could be the difference between life and death.

Guest and Visitor Safety
For yourself and your employees, your business probably has a set of safety practices that everyone needs to follow. You might offer training and have everyone practice routines on a regular basis, to ensure that they remain sharp. Of course, all of these practical tasks do not relate to onsite guests or visitors. If you’re going to be having someone come to the site, whether it is a property owner, client, or inspector, you must ensure that they know the possible hazards. Confirm that you can provide adequate safety equipment for anyone who will be visiting the site on a given day.

Visibility
When you are engaged in a particular task, it may be difficult for you to think about all the things that are going on around you. And yet, that is a common source of jobsite injury. A worker is using a piece of equipment, not realizing that there is another worker around the corner or behind them. Increasing visibility and awareness is an important task to ensure the safety of the entire site. Increase lighting and add windows or mirrors as needed to ensure that people can see what they are doing and the environment around them.

Information Security
You may not think of the security of your business information as a safety task, but it certainly is. Your business’s ability to keep your information, and that of your clients, safe is a matter of security. Without it, you could be at risk for identity theft, property theft, as well as other personal threats. Make sure that you are keeping sensitive information in a secure place. If you’re not sure how to do that in a digital format, you may want to search for companies that can manage your data and encrypt it so that people cannot break in and gather that information for other uses.

Keeping your business and everyone in it safe sometimes calls for the unexpected. With these tips, you’ll have a better idea of what you should do. To discover the benefits of running your own contracting business, contact CSLS today!