Hearing Protection: Reducing The Noise Your Workers Encounter
Earplugs and other forms of hearing protection are crucial parts of ensuring the health and safety of your workers.
Hearing protection is a crucial part of ensuring the health and safety of your workers. Reducing or minimizing the amount of noise that your workers encounter make a tremendous difference. There are numerous ways you can ensure hearing protection is properly introduced and followed. Here are just some of those ways.
Basic Hearing Protection Measures
Hearing protection often starts with the most basic standards. For instance, providing simple earplugs or earmuffs can start to reduce the noise around the workers. In fact, in environments where the noise level is about 85 decibels, it is a virtual necessity that these workers have some form of hearing protection since anything above 85 decibels is unsafe and dangerous to the human ear. How effective the hearing protection you provide is given a score based on Noise Reduction Rating (NRR) scale.
Building Design and Workplace Layout
Insulating walls, ceilings, and floors can also benefit your workers. Insulation can muffle dangerously loud noises. Using eco-friendly construction materials in your building is a trend that is gaining steam. By choosing these materials, you can keep sources of excessive noise contained within one section of your building and prevent it from reaching other areas. One simple solution concerning workplace layout is to divide employee areas from louder areas containing noisy machines. This method of hearing protection becomes increasingly useful when barriers are installed to help deflect or diffuse the concentration of noise.
Updating Equipment
Upgrading your building’s noisy equipment so that they run more quietly and smoothly is another great way to protect your employees’ hearing. Not only do newer machines make less noise, but improved equipment can also save you money. How might you save this money? Productivity will go up, and insurance claims will go down. When deciding whether or not to upgrade your equipment, you should factor in how much you stand to gain or lose based on overall costs and the human factor: the health of your employees.
Checking on Employee Health
Offer hearing exams for your employees.These exams can assess their hearing health before and after encountering the ambient noise in your work environment. Noise can’t always be entirely eliminated, but it can be reduced to safe and tolerable levels. You should always be proactive any time you have a chance to preserve or protect your employees’ hearing. After all, everyone reacts to sound differently: rotating employees in and out of excessively-noisy areas may be another unexpected but still effective solution.
Prioritize Safety with G&M Services
G&M Services is proud of our employees and the dedication they have for safety in the workplace. Our employees are also rewarded for positive safety practices. We incorporate weekly and monthly discussions and meeting to ensure that all involved are aware of how to handle equipment and potential situations that could occur during a project.
G&M Services offers services in the way of concrete drilling and sawing, concrete scanning and FireStop. To get started with us, call today at 410-787-8828 or visit our contact page. Follow the official company page today on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
