You set your workers out on a roofing job that you lined up the previous day. Everything goes smoothly until one of your employees slips off the roof and gets injured. Now you have to handle an expensive payout.
You feel bad about your employee’s injury, so you can’t help but keep flashing back trying to figure out what went wrong. Chances are, it could have been something simpler than you think.
To help you make sure this situation doesn’t happen again, here are a few tips that you should take to heart the next time your roofers go out on a job.
1. Have a Heart to Heart
The most important part of avoiding injury is to look for any potential risks and talk to your workers before they begin the job. This doesn’t have to be some drawn out conversation. Only 5 minutes will do.
If you want, feel free to come up with dangerous scenarios that they may run into on the job and ask them how they would handle them.
2. Don’t Work During Bad Weather
If it’s raining or snowing, you’ll want to hold off on letting your employees head to a job site. For one, slippery conditions such as these are an open invitation for one of your roofers to slip.
For another, a lot of the work you do on a roof during these weather conditions won’t even stick. You’ll find that any roof shingles you place won’t stay down.
3. Check Your Ladders
If a roofer’s ladder isn’t positioned correctly, it may topple over and send them spiraling to the ground. After they put their ladders up it’s important that both the base of the ladder and the top of it is secure. The ladder should also not be set up at any funny angles.
4. Wear the Right Gear
Your workers can’t be safe if they aren’t equipped with the proper gear to do their job. They need gloves to prevent cutting their hands, ropes to secure themselves and their ladder, shoes with traction so it’s harder for them to fall, and harnesses to catch them in the event that they do.
You can equip each employee with a safety gear booklet so they know what they need to have or you can run over the checklist with them before each job.
5. Sweep the Roof
Imagine that you’re working on a roof, and you end up stepping on a nail that’s sticking out of the roof. You didn’t see it because a few leaves were on top of it.
Roofers fall because of situations like this all the time. The easiest way to avoid it is by taking a few minutes to sweep a roof before working.
Safety Measures all Roofers Should Take to Heart
Even the easiest roof job can end with a roofer tragically falling. This is why it’s important that your employees are aware of all the dangers and safety precautions before they start each job. Use these tips to keep your people safe.
Don’t read these tips and think that you’re in the clear to DIY your roof work. Contact us and we’ll send out one of our trained professional roofers to take take care of it for you.