4 reasons businesses should care about water safety. As a business owner, you’ll likely have 101 different things on your plate at any one time. While some of these can absolutely take a back seat and be dealt with at a later date, others – especially those which are safety-related – need to be prioritised.
Water safety fits into that second bracket. It’s easy to put it off or not take it fully seriously, but this is rarely an effective long-term strategy. If you still need some more convincing, then here are 4 of the main reasons why businesses should care about water safety.
1.Protect your brand
The kinds of issues that can arise from poor water hygiene – such as outbreaks of waterborne disease – can have absolutely disastrous effects on your brand.
Simply put, if people don’t think you can even provide safe premises with safe water, it’s unlikely that they’ll trust your ability to run any of the more complicated aspects of your business.
Maintaining water hygiene is pretty much the bare minimum you should do when it comes to protecting your brand. You won’t see any surprising results if you get it right, but if you get it wrong, it could be catastrophic.
2.Avoid regulatory complications
Water safety isn’t just some branding nicety, it’s also a legal requirement for all businesses in England.
Taking care of basic water hygiene is formally required under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, and even if you don’t have an outbreak of a serious disease, failure to put the proper measures in place could result in regulatory action being taken against you.
In most cases, you’ll need to come up with a hygiene strategy that will then be detailed and outlined in a formal Water safety plan. This will assign responsibility for different tasks to certain people in the organisation, ensuring that issues are kept to a minimum.
3.Look after your customers & employees
More generally, water safety is crucial in order to keep your customers and employees safe. Quite apart from your branding and legal obligations, you have a duty to care for people who spend time on your premises.
Again, water safety is a minimum requirement in this area. People nowadays expect that when they turn on the tap, the water that comes out of it will be safe to drink and won’t harm them; this doesn’t just happen automatically, it depends on you taking your health and safety responsibilities seriously.
4.Maintain stable premises
Lastly, taking water safety seriously will help you to maintain stable business premises in the long run. It will encourage looking after your plumbing and water-related appliances more generally, decreasing the likelihood of leaks and other basic issues.
Water safety, and water hygiene in particular, isn’t something that’s too difficult to take care of. Once you’ve come up with and implemented a comprehensive testing and mitigation strategy, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep it going. It requires ongoing diligence, and once you’ve gotten the ball rolling, you mustn’t take your eye off it.
Hope you’ve found our article, 4 reasons businesses should care about water safety useful.
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