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What are the steps that you can take to ensure your employee's safety from physical hazards? Watch this video from 'The Healthy Juan.'

No matter how mundane your occupation may be, safety hazards exist in every workplace that is why every good manager must know how to ensure the safety of his employees.

To prevent accidents and sickness to happen inside your office, its vital to identify, monitor, and reduce the risk associated with these hazards.

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But what is a workplace hazard anyway?

Simply put, these are any aspect of work that can cause health and safety risks and have the potential to harm. While some hazards are more likely to be present than others, depending on your line of work, there will always be hazards that are relevant to your business.

“Ang issue na ito ay napapanahon na pag-usapan para makapagbigay tayo ng mga impormasyon sa mga manggagawa ng mga posibleng panganib sa kanilang pinagtatrabahuhan,” tells Engr. Elmer G. Benedictos, the Supervising Health Program Officer of DOH, to The Healthy Juan.

Engr. Benedictos identified the five kinds of workplace hazards to be the following: physical, chemical, biological, ergonomic, and psychosocial.

He says that these occur highly in industries of agriculture, manufacturing, and construction due to lack of safety orientation and Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs).

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But out of all the risk in the workplace, the most common yet the least obvious are physical hazards.

Despite its given name, physical hazards aren't always something that you can see or touch. Normally, it is anything within the environment that can cause bodily harm including noise, vibration, poor lighting, extreme temperatures, and radiation.

To identify if something is a physical hazard or not, it is vital to assess your workplace first by asking the following questions:

• What kind of environmental exposure do my employees face?
• Do my employees work around reactive chemicals or objects?
• How long are my employees exposed to sunlight and other environmental factors?
• Do my employees have pieces of equipment that protect their hearing?
• How about protection for extreme temperatures?

Once you've identified these hazards, the next step is to reduce the risk posed to your employees.

Engr. Benedictos advises, “Pagdating naman sa preventive measures, may tinatawag tayong engineering controls na kung saan pinapalitan ang mapanganib na proseso sa pagawaan.”

Engineering controls, he says, help reduce the risk through physical means which include providing safety pieces of equipment, reducing noises and vibration in the workplace, and providing proper ventilation and air conditioning for employees.

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Physical safety hazards that aren't obvious can pose a danger to even the most experienced employee and manager, so it's important to plan and take precautions.

For more information about identifying other workplace safety hazards, be sure to check the video from The Healthy Juan above.