HKS : Importance Of Housekeeping To Workers at Workplace

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Chapter : Housekeeping Safety

Importance Of Housekeeping To Workers at Workplace  

Is your workplace a mess? If so, it's time to get employees/workers to clean up their act, for the sake of their safety and health. Employees toMake the Connection Between Housekeeping and Their Health and Safety :- 

A messy workplace is more than just unsightly. It has the potential to create hazards, including:

1. Fire! Paper garbage, wood shavings, combustible dusts, rags soaked with flammable chemicals-if not disposed of properly, these items can create fire and explosion hazards in the workplace.
2. Falls! Did you know that most workplace falls that result in a reportable injury are falls on the same level? How does that happen? Walkways and work areas that are cluttered become dangerous to walk through, and you—or your coworkers—can slip, trip, and fall.
3. Fungus! In areas that are not kept clean and dry, or where food wastes are disposed of, waste can rot and mold can grow, creating a health hazard.
4. Infestations! Messy areas can become pest harborages—nesting and reproduction areas for everything from cockroaches to rats. These creatures can contribute to allergic reactions and workplace asthma, and they can also carry disease

Keep It Safe! Clean It Up!

Keeping the workplace safe and healthy starts with requiring employees to:

1. Put things away. Put your tools and materials away at the end of your shift or when you switch projects. Throw away trash, making sure to keep general wastes, hazardous wastes, and flammable chemical wastes separated and to place them in appropriate containers.
2. Take out the trash. When your trash container is full, or at the end of your shift (if this is required by your supervisor), take out the trash. This will prevent accumulations of flammable, putrescible, and otherwise problematic waste.
3. Sweep up. If the dust you're sweeping could be hazardous to breathe, use wet methods or a HEPA vacuum to clean it up.
4. Dust. Don't let dust accumulate on surfaces. As with sweeping, if the dust could be dangerous to breathe, use wet methods or a HEPA vacuum. Remember to check the top of surfaces that are above your eye level and behind obstructions.
5. Mop up. Take care of damp spots and spills right away if you can.

Benifit of housekeeping

Safety Benefits

1. Reduced accidents: A clean and organized workspace reduces the risk of tripping, slipping, and falling hazards.
2. Improved visibility: Good housekeeping ensures that walkways and aisles are clear, reducing the risk of accidents.
3. Enhanced emergency response: A well-maintained workspace enables quicker response times in emergency situations.

Productivity Benefits

1. Increased efficiency: A clean and organized workspace helps workers find what they need quickly, reducing time wasted searching for tools or materials.
2. Improved morale: A well-maintained workspace can boost employee morale and motivation.
3. Reduced downtime: Good housekeeping can help prevent equipment breakdowns and reduce downtime.

Quality Benefits

1. Improved product quality: A clean workspace reduces the risk of contamination and ensures that products are manufactured in a controlled environment.
2. Reduced defects: Good housekeeping can help prevent defects by ensuring that equipment and materials are properly maintained.

Other Benefits

1. Compliance: Good housekeeping can help organizations comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
2. Cost savings: Regular cleaning and maintenance can help extend the life of equipment and reduce maintenance costs.
3. Enhanced reputation: A well-maintained workspace can enhance an organization's reputation and demonstrate a commitment to quality and safety.

HKS : Good Housekeeping- Is For a Safe Space

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Chapter : Housekeeping Safety

Good Housekeeping- Is For a Safe Space

Housekeeping at a construction site, office, or home can often provide an indicator for the level of safety culture and expectations for that project or facility.  When housekeeping is highly maintained, injuries are typically quite low. When housekeeping is low, you can expect injuries will increase. 
Why?

Poor housekeeping provides more safety hazards in the work and home environments, causing more chances for injuries to occur. The most obvious hazards of poor housekeeping are slips, trips, and falls from cluttered and dirty walkway areas.

Keeping your work and living spaces clean and organized is an important way to prevent accidents. Below are some suggestions of how to reduce risk of injury.

Home

• Keep floors and stairs clear of objects that could cause slips, trips, and falls.
  
• Store cleaning products away from food, and out of the reach of children.
• Keep surfaces clean to prevent the spread of germs.
• Be careful with heavy objects stored high that require overhead reaching.
• Properly store items that could cause injury from falling.
• Ensure proper lighting to prevent shadows and trip hazards.

Office

• Keep floors and walkways clear of objects that could cause slips, trips, and falls.
• Keep drawers and filing cabinets shut to prevent them from tipping over, or from people running into them.
• Do not over-stack materials which have the potential to tip over.
• Clean coffee cups and other food containers to prevent the growth of bacteria.
• Clean up all spills right away.
• Keep your work area organized and clutter-free.

Construction Site

• Keep walkways and traffic zones free from debris, power cords, hoses, etc.
• Remove waste to minimize fire hazards.
• Clean up and dispose of scrap, waste, and unused materials.
• Be cautious of slippery surfaces like sealed concrete or sawdust.
• Keep materials at least 5 feet from openings, roof edges, excavations, or trenches.
• Remove, or bend over, nails that protrude from lumber.

HKS : Housekeeping At Job Site

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Chapter : Housekeeping Safety

Housekeeping At Job Site

 
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The negative impressions and implications of poor housekeeping can affect you, your customers and co-workers for a long time.

If your housekeeping habits are poor, the result may be employee injuries, penalties and even difficulty in securing future work.

Think about how a “minor” issue like housekeeping can have such serious consequences. We should also be setting the expectation for everyone who enters the job site that housekeeping matters!

Hazards:

• Employees trip, fall, strike or are struck by out-of-place objects like leaning lumber, plywood and other materials that pose tripping, falling or striking hazards.
• Injuries from using Misplaced / Improper tools because the correct tool can’t be found.
• Lowered production because of the time spent maneuvering over and around someone else’s mess, and time spent looking for proper tools and materials.
• Time spent investigating and reporting accidents that could have been avoided.
• Lumber with protruding nails. Remember to pull all nails, bending over is not good enough.
• Cords or hoses across walk ways. Elevate if possible, cover with plywood or lumber, bevel edges to reduce trips.
• Protruding pipes, lumber, rebar or other materials in travel areas.
• Debris from cutting of conduit, copper and plastic pipes in the travel paths.
• Trash from lunch and breaks thrown on the ground.
• Debris in stairwells

Safe procedures:

• Clean up after yourself.
• Pick up your trash and debris and dispose of it properly.
• Have a place for everything and put everything in its place.
• Store everything straight and square.
• Inform all subcontractors of their responsibility for housekeeping.
• Stack materials orderly and secure them so they won’t topple.
• Implement a routine cleaning schedule.Depending on the work, it might be daily or weekly for more extensive clean-ups.
• Keep your work area clean throughout the day. This will minimize the amount of time needed to clean a “larger mess” at the end of the day.

An uncluttered workplace shows respect for those who work here. Help keep it that way!
Now let’s talk about how we can improve housekeeping in our facility.

HKS : Fundamentals of Good Housekeeping On The Job

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Chapter : Housekeeping Safety

Fundamentals of Good Housekeeping On The Job

You have a pretty good idea how safe a job is just by looking at it before you start to work. Even a "Sidewalk Superintendent" knows this. A job that looks clean, with everything in its place, is a safe job. That's all we mean when we talk about job housekeeping.

Good housekeeping calls for just two things. Try to remember them:

1. Keep trash and loose objects picked up and dispose of them.

2. Pile all materials and park all tools and equipment in the places where they belong.

These are the fundamentals of good house-keeping and they're simple enough. If we don't follow these two rules, we're letting ourselves in for trouble.

Putting the rules to work is not so simple. A grand cleanup once a week won't do the trick. Housekeeping is a job that can't be put off. We have to do it. It's up to each individual to be their own job housekeeper.

When you see something lying around where it could trip an individual or fall on them, put it in a safe place. Don't wait for someone else to do it. If it's something that he or she will be looking for, you can put it safely where they can see it.

You've seen jobs, and probably worked on some, where it wasn't safe to put your foot down without first looking twice to be sure you weren't going to twist an ankle or run a nail through your shoe. A job like that is poorly run, badly managed. Probably it's losing money as well as causing accidents.

Some jobs have walkways, aisles, stairs, and ladders by which you get from one place to another. It's particularly important that these lines of travel be kept safe and clear of loose objects. Workers often carry loads on these routes. They can't always pick their steps or look around to be sure that nothing is going to trip them or fall on them.

A wet or greasy walkway may cause a bad accident. If you see a treacherous spot, make it your business to do some sweeping, mopping or scraping.

Brick, tile, pipe, steel rods and similar materials scattered about the job or insecurely piled on scaffolds or platforms can cause accidents. All material should be piled in the place set aside for it. Each kind of material has its own characteristic. But some rules for piling apply to all kinds:

• First, you have to consider how the material is going to be taken out of the pile. If it's going to be a fast-moving operation with a big tonnage being unloaded in a short time, be sure to leave space for the worker and the equipment that will have to do the work.
• Be courteous. Never pile material in such a way that it will endanger a worker who has to work on it or will make a backbreaking job for the worker who breaks down the pile.

Other points to think about are:

1. The strength of the support if you're piling material on a floor, platform or scaffold.
2. The stability of the ground if you're piling a heavy load.
3. The height of the pile so it won't topple.
4. The need for building racks if it's pipe or rods you have to stack.
5. The wisdom of waiting for the proper equipment to handle structural steel and other heavy material.

We all know the value of good lighting in job housekeeping. Poor lighting and accidents go together. When you find a light out, report it and get a replacement.

It's not hard to keep a job clean if all useless materials, boxes, scrap lumber and other trash are picked up and removed regularly. 

Remember, if they're allowed to accumulate for even a few days, the job becomes a messy and unsafe place to work.

HKS : Housekeeping

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Chapter : Housekeeping Safety

Housekeeping

Housekeeping on the job means cleaning up scrap and debris, putting it in containers, and making sure the containers are emptied regularly. It also means proper storage of materials and equipment.
We don’t do this to make the site look good.

Housekeeping helps prevent accidents and injuries.

We all know how fast rubbish accumulates on site – scrap lumber, broken bricks, pieces of drywall, garbage from coffee breaks and lunches.

Construction rubbish is often irregular in shape, hard to handle, and full of sharp objects.

One of the biggest problems is packaging. Too often it gets removed from material and left where it falls.

This creates tripping and slipping hazards. It also makes other hazards difficult to see. Even worse, it
invites more mess. When the site isn’t cleaned up, no one cares about leaving garbage where it drops.

When that happens, you can’t see faulty wiring, protruding nails, damaged flooring, or missing
scaffold planks. Tools and material can get misplaced in a cluttered work area.

How can you concentrate on your work when you’re worried about slipping, falling, or tripping on debris underfoot? Production and installation time go up while quality tails off.

Mess also makes it difficult to use materials handling equipment. As a result, more material gets handled manually. This increases the risk of injury and damage.

Housekeeping starts with you and me. What can we do about it?

• Clean up as work proceeds.
• Keep equipment and the areas around equipment free of scrap and debris.
• Keep stairways, ramps, and other travel areas clear.
• Secure loose or light material stored on roofs and open floors to keep it from blowing away in the wind.
• Don’t let material fall from any level of the project. Use an enclosed chute or lower the material in containers.
• Keep material at least 1.8 metres or 6 feet away from floor and roof openings, floor and roof edges, excavations, and trenches.
• Store material so that it won’t roll or slide in the direction of the opening. Use blocking if necessary.
• Before handling used lumber, remove or bend over any protruding nails and chip away hardened concrete.
• Housekeeping is especially important when it comes to fire prevention. Flammable rubbish and debris should be immediately removed from the vicinity of welding, flame cutting, propane heating, or other ignition sources.

A clean site may not always be a safe site. But housekeeping is a good way to start improving health
and safety on the job.