Category: Workplace Tips

Violence, Harassment and Bullying In The Workplace

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Violence, Harassment and Bullying In The Workplace

Violence, Harassment and Bullying in the Workplace

We all deserve to work in an environment that is free from harassment, violence and bullying. If you see or experience any of these, there are a number of steps to take towards resolution.

Recognize

Types of Violence, Harassment and Bullying include: Physical, psychological, verbal, domestic, digital, sexual, etc.

These forms of Workplace Violence, Harassment and Bullying can be seen through:

  • Physical violence, assault, aggression, damaging objects, throwing, etc.
  • Threats of violence, in person, over the phone, via email, text, etc.
  • Verbal abuse, name calling, tone of voice used, etc.
  • Social media bullying, trolling, etc.
  • Sexual comments, unwanted physical contact, being shown images sexual in nature, etc.
  • Domestic violence spilling into the workplace
  • Stalking

Report

Speak Up! Report immediately to:

A Supervisor/Manager, H&S Rep/Committee Member, Senior Management or anyone you trust.

Investigation

All reports of violence, harassment and bullying must be investigated and corrective measures taken in accordance with all policies and procedures. It is your responsibility to report incidents you are involved in or witness to, and to co-operate with the investigators during the investigation process.

If you are looking for onsite first aid training, JHSC certification training or working at heights training in Ontario contact us.

Violence and Harassment in the workplace

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Violence and Harassment in the workplace

Violence, Harassment, and Bullying in the workplace!

The workplace is often subject to violence, harassment, and bullying. All employees are entitled to be able to work in an environment that is free from all forms of violence and harassment.

Whenever you are experiencing or witnessing this type of behavior it needs to be reported immediately!

Workplace violence is defined as any type of physical form that a person inflicts on another that causes or could cause injury to the worker.

In contrast, workplace harassment is when someone speaks inappropriately to another worker. This can include unwelcome and offensive words, or embarrassing/humiliating another co-worker.

To prevent workplace violence you can:

  • Report the violence when seen
  • Treat all employees with the same level of respect and professionalism
  • Having a manager on duty at all times to oversee workers

Here at F.A.S.T. Rescue, we pride ourselves on ensuring that everyone in the workplace is always working safely. Whenever you see violence of any kind in the workplace, make sure to report it

and keep your workplace safe for everyone!

 

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Workplace Violence

 

F.A.S.T Rescue offers Accredited Fire Safety Program

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F.A.S.T Rescue offers Accredited Fire Safety Program

F.A.S.T Rescue offers Accredited Fire Safety Program

Fire Safety Plan

F.A.S.T. Rescue is now offering an Accredited Online Fire Safety Online Certification program!  This course is designed to help protect the public and responding firefighters.  Most building owners in Ontario is required to have a Fire Safety Plan, approved and implemented at their building.  All “Supervisory” staff of that building has to be trained on how to implement the Fire Safety Plan, and understand their own roles and responsibilities under that plan – before being given any responsibilities at the building.  The training in this program allows everyone to fully understand their responsibilities included in section 2.8 of the Ontario Fire Code.

When a building fire occurs, if you stick to the fire safety plan, firefighters who arrive on the scene will have easy access to the building, and safely be able to put out the fire. When purchasing the course, you can select 1 course out of the 3 available:

For commercial buildings this course covers: 

  • Understand emergency fire, evacuation, defend in place, and recovery considerations
  • Understand and navigate commercial building safety plan
  • Review best practices in fire service arrival
  • Learn maintenance requirements of building life systems in Ontario

For residential buildings this course covers:

  • Understand emergency fire, evacuation, defend in place, and recovery considerations
  • Understand and navigate residential building fire safety plan
  • Review best practices in fire service arrival
  • Learn maintenance requirements of building life systems in Ontario

For security guards this course covers:

  • Understand emergency fire, evacuation, defend in place, and recovery considerations
  • Understand and navigate building safety plan in Ontario
  • Review best practices in fire service arrival
  • Understand maintenance requirements of building life systems in Ontario

With thousands of firefighters across Ontario risking their lives for public safety every day, completing the online or in-person training for residential or commercial buildings is a small but legally required step that every responsible property owner, property management team, and employer must complete. Click here to take your fire safety program today!

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What’s Hot Work Training and Why Do You Need It?

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What’s Hot Work Training and Why Do You Need It?

Hot work. That sounds like work that you do that’s a little bit spicy, right? Things get a little heated? That may be what it sounds like, but it’s not exactly right.

What Is It?

Hot work is work that produces a flame, spark, or any heat. It’s work that is often seen around construction or demolition sites. Hot work often involves cutting, welding, using arc welding equipment, portable gas, soldering, or grinding.

What’s the Danger?

Hot work can introduce fire hazards into the scenarios and areas where it is being conducted, so a high level of safety training and skill is required for the job.

With hot work, you’re frequently around gas when you’re working with flames. That means leaks could occur, and release flammable gas into the area.

Often, additional personnel are assigned to fire watch with hot work is being conducted to make sure that there is no possibility that anything greater than a minor fire could develop.

Gas detectors are also commonly put into place. If a flammable or combustible gas in the atmosphere gets to ten percent or higher of the lower explosive level, the hot work must be stopped until the source of the leak is found and repaired.

Another possible danger is flash fires. These happen when gasses like Hydrogen Sulfide or Methane build up around the wellhead area where the hot work is being performed. These gases are able to be monitored by gas detectors as well.

Work with grinding produces sparks that can cause considerable damage if the proper protective gear is not worn. Face shields are required, and fire protection equipment. Besides fire danger, fingers can also get stuck in the grinding wheel, which, needless to say, is something you wouldn’t want to happen.

Why Do You Need a Certification?

Because you’re literally playing with fire, a permit is important. A certification allows your employer to know that you’re qualified for the job you’re applying for, and you know the safety measures required of you.

When you’re safe and the area you’re working in is safe, everyone can rest assured that the job will be done well and be done securely. Besides that, every site and every employer you work for will require that you have your certification. Otherwise, you’ll be some random person wielding fire, and they won’t be able to trust you.

The Course

At F.A.S.T, creating a safe work environment is highly emphasized.

The class is four hours long, and the certification lasts for three years. You’ll learn how to identify hazards that arise with hot work. Atmospheric testing, setting up a permit system, and safeguarding areas is all also covered. You’ll be able to follow safe work policies, and not have to take another course for three more years.

Get the most comprehensive hot work training out there, because you don’t want to risk it when it comes to your safety.

Private Workplace Training

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Private Workplace Training

If you run a business, you’re well aware of the Occupational Health and Safety Act. You know, the labor law that says each employer needs to furnish their employees with a workplace that’s safe from physical hazards. And that employees must go through a workplace safety training program.

So you know you’ve got to train your employees on their safety. But are you doing the best that you can?

What Does OHSA Require?

OHSA was enacted to cover workers and protect them from safety and health hazards that might arise on the job.

It puts procedures into place for employers to be required to have a plan in case of workplace hazards. It enforces these laws, which helps create a safe workplace for employees, because employers may not have done so voluntarily in the past.

It details what to do in case of harassment, toxic substances, how to follow codes of practice, the duties of employers, and more.

You can read about the requirements of OHSA in their entirety.

So What Do You Do?

You’re aware of OHSA. So you know you need to provide your workers with safety training. There’s a lot of options out there for you to choose from. Many people might want to turn to an online training program to get the work out of the way, but online training has been proven to be much less successful than working with someone face to face.

E-learning can provide employees with the bare minimum of what they need to learn. But the information doesn’t stick in their heads as well as it does with in-person training.

Learning the safety elements in the actual field instead of learning them online provides a hands-on experience your employees wouldn’t get otherwise. It makes your program more credible, your employees even safer, and your company reputation more reputable.

In-person training sessions also eliminate the ability of your employees to slack off and miss vital information that will help keep them safe. They can ask questions specific to your business and be prepared for incidents particular to your work environment.

Private Workplace Training

F.A.S.T. private workplace training offers you any possible type of training you could need. We cover every element of the workplace safety world. Forklift training, First Aid & CPR, Fall Arrest, Spill Response, Event Coverage – there’s workplace training program for it all. Learning these safety measures effectively is critical to an employees safety and success, and it’s not something to be taken lightly.

Online Training

If you absolutely can’t work with in-person training, we’ve still got options for you with online programs. We cover everything from chainsaw safety to trenching and shoring with our online safety videos.

Whatever your need is, F.A.S.T. Rescue has just the thing to cover all the safety information out there.

Protective Wear, What Do You Need It For Anyway?

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Protective Wear, What Do You Need It For Anyway?

If you’ve ever worked in an industry where you need protective gear to be able to conduct your job, you know that it’s of vital importance. You can get written up for not wearing the proper safety gear, and if employees fail to wear the proper protection, potentially not survive an audit. Most importantly, you might be injured on the job if you fail to wear the proper protection.

People with regular desk jobs mostly have to worry about paper cuts or carpal tunnel syndrome, but you have to worry about life and death burns, hand protection, and eye protection.

Personal protective equipment is called PPE, and it’s required for workplaces that work with hazardous materials, fire, welding, and more.

Eye Protection

These aren’t just your regular sunglasses. Eye protection in professional fields means heavy duty protective gear that might actually prevent you from going blind. It’s an important safety precaution that your goggles fit tightly, so they don’t slip off by accident and expose your eyes to danger.

Welding goggles help you be able to withstand the heat of the products you’re working with and still be able to clearly see what you’re working on. They’re super flexible and durable, because when welding your gear tends to take a lot of wear and tear.

Other professions like chemistry, food, construction, and others, may need goggles in order to protect the eyes. It’s also necessary to have cleaning solution on hand so that vision is never restricted due to cloudy eyewear.

Fire Retardant Clothing

Fire retardant clothing is just that – it helps protect individuals from their clothing catching on fire. It usually comes in a jumpsuit form for the employee to wear, or a jacket that they can put on when needed.

The clothes are made out of industrial strength PVC and Polyester. They are usually worn at construction sites, chemical refineries, or oil and gas companies.

Gloves

You use gloves around your kitchen, but there’s a huge number of different gloves out there that you can use and are needed for various industries.

Mechanic gloves help keep their hands safe when working with heavy duty equipment and can increase the traction of a grip. Ski gloves, welders gloves, and lineman’s gloves are all examples of industry specific gloves that workplaces require.

Disposable gloves are important when working with food so that there is no contamination. Clean room gloves have much the same concept in mind, but when it comes to making electronic components instead.

Hearing Protection

It is required that employees who are exposed to noise in their workplace the exceeds 85 decibels wear hearing protection.

Hearing protection can come in the form of earplugs or ear muffs. Earplugs are used for lower noise environments that still require them, while ear muffs are necessary for areas with higher volumes of noise like construction. Air traffic controllers and factory workers also require strong hearing protection.

Masks

Facemasks and personal respirators are needed for people with jobs that deal with toxic chemicals or work that produces small fibers that would be dangerous to breath in, like carpentry.

The face mask category can range from dental face masks to gas masks, sometimes called a full face piece. An N95 masks protects the wearer against liquid or solid particles that may be dangerous to breathe.

Face pieces can lock into place to give lateral and frontal protection to the wearer against the hazards they may be working with. They attach to headgear or a bracket, and literally allow you to get your head in the game without fearing for your safety.

If you’re in need of safety gear, F.A.S.T. can be your one-stop shop for everything you require to stay safe and sound. They have all of this protective wear and more available for you to finally get some peace of mind.

All of the gear is certified by the labour boards in every workplace and business that they’re necessary for use in. Committed to health and safety supplies, you’re being well taken care of when you choose to put your safety in the hands of F.A.S.T.

Why You Need Systems 24-7 In Your Business

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Why You Need Systems 24-7 In Your Business

We don’t need to tell you twice. It’s a lot of work to manage your business and all your employees. When you think about it, it might seem overwhelming. There are so many different steps that you didn’t think about before.

Like implementing a Health and Safety program. Maybe you’re old hat, or maybe you have no idea where to even begin. Either way, it’s a multi-faceted process that will take up a lot of your valuable time if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What’s Systems 24-7?

You need System’s 24-7 on your side. It’s a one-stop portal that puts everything you need to manage your Health and Safety program together in one place. And it works for you, 24-7. See what we did there?

It’s an efficient online learning program that provides each and every employee or contractor with what they need during the training process. It gives them training, reports, policies, and forms that they may need, all bundled together in an easy interface so you don’t have to go searching through the confusing ether of papers out there.

It’s also priced modularly. You can customize it to the best fit for your company’s Health and Safety needs, and your budget.

How Does It Work?

Imagine a system that will do all the work for you. That’s what you’re going to get with the 24-7 program. You basically set it up, and let it go to work.

Learning Management

Your employees or contractors can go through courses that address your specific legal requirements regarding Health and Safety. The training courses that they go through can be specifically tailored to each employee’s specific role. You can also send them their training before they’ve even come to work, so right when they start, they’ll be fully prepared for their job.

Systems 24-7 tracks the completion of each of the courses so you don’t have to. You’ll get a comprehensive report of your employee’s progress.

Course Editor

Got a unique Health and Safety need? No problem. With the course editor, you can create your own courses to fit exactly what your business needs. You’ll be able to prove your due diligence with the reports that 24-7 will send you when your employees complete this course.

Policy Management

Your business is always changing and updating. That’s a good thing, but it means that you might have to sift through a lot of paperwork to update your employees on your policies. Not with Systems 24-7.

Systems 24-7 allows you to manage your policies and keep your employees up to date all in one place. Send off e-mails about your new protocols, store them, and catalog them. It’s that easy. You can also get reminders for when reviews are going to be conducted.

Your Resources

If you need a document, we’ve got it for you. There are hundreds of customizable resources in the resource library. These include SOPS, hazard assessments, human resource document templates, and more.

Now that you know all about what Systems 24-7 is going to do for you, why wait? You can breathe easy and focus on growing your business when you know all the Health and Safety concerns have been taken care of.

So get it today. There’s no point in putting it off any longer. Still not convinced? You can go through a demo of the program to see what it’s all about.

Oh, you also get access to all these online training courses. There’s over 200 of them. No big deal.

Tips and Tricks for a More Energy Efficient Office

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Tips and Tricks for a More Energy Efficient Office

Maybe you’re a small business owner, or an energy-conscious employee. Either way, it is never a bad idea to make sure that your office is as efficient as possible. Not only would you save money on an electric bill, but you can rest easy knowing that you’re helping the environment.

Go To Sleep

Energy saving modes on computers, printers, and fax machines all save around seventy percent of the power that they would be using if you just left them on. Make sure energy saving mode is enabled on all your devices. Taking it a step further, before you leave for lunch put your computer in sleep mode. Doing this will ensure that you’re using minimal power. If you can, switch to laptops – they use about eighty percent less energy than desktop computers. And when you leave your office, power your computer all the way down for the day.

Update Your Fridge

If your office has a fridge that hasn’t been updated recently, it’s probably sapping power. An Energy Star fridge could be available to you at a discounted price depending on the year of your fridge. Getting a new refrigerator could save you more than a hundred dollars per year, so the investment you make will pay itself off sooner than you might think.

Get a Bright Idea

Energy saving light bulbs last anywhere from ten to twenty-five times longer than outdated light bulbs. Depending on your old model of bulb, you can save around fifty dollars a year just by making a simple switch to LED light bulbs. If you can’t make the switch with all the lights in your office, you can do your part by replacing any personal lighting you might have in your work area or at your desk.

Switch To Power Strips

When electronic devices are plugged into power outlets, even if the devices are off, they can still sap power. When cords are plugged into a power strip, it’s easier for the strip to be powered off than having to go and unplug each machine individually.

Keep the Door Closed

It may seem like a simple step, but when your air is treated to be either warmer or cooler than the outside temperature, leaving doors open can sap the treated air. If you have freight doors, leaving them open can lose a large amount of the conditioned air. Sealing cracks in doors and making sure they’re airtight also helps keep the air in or out. Keeping your thermostat at 72 degrees in the winter or less and 76 degrees more in the summer also helps reduce your energy bill.

Don’t Print

Reading your documents on the computer can help cut back on energy output that you would have expended by printing. And, surprise surprise, it also saves paper, which is you doing your part to help the environment even further.

Educate Your Employees

The best way to get everyone to be as green and responsible with energy as possible is to let them know how they’re using it. F.A.S.T. Rescue has a course on energy efficiency in the workplace designed to teach how to set an energy efficient strategy into place. The more you know, the more conscious you can be of your carbon footprint and the steps you can take to reduce it.

Why Do You Need Business Continuity Management

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Why Do You Need Business Continuity Management

What Is It?

Business continuity management sounds like a big string of complicated words that you may never heard of before.

Business continuity is a management process that holistically analyzes the needs of your business. It identifies the potential threats that the business might face from cybersecurity to theft.

Once the potential threats to the business are realized, a framework is built to place guards against these things happening. The stakeholders, business values, and brand reputation will stay intact when safeguarded against these things.

Business continuity management looks at both internal and external threats to the company. It involves disaster recovery planning, crisis management, management of incidents, contingency planning, and management in case of emergencies.

Why Do I Need It?

The business world is, to put it mildly, an ever-evolving place. We work amidst a constantly evolving environment, which means constantly evolving threats.

That means that developing strategies to manage the threats that might arise in your business is extremely important. You need to defend yourself against serious internal disasters or external incidents. A business continuity management plan will have safe holds in place to guard against these things.

Having a business continuity management plan in place helps increase your organization’s reputability. Not only do regulations require that certain businesses have one in place, people will recognize that you had the foresight to enact the plan if things go wrong.

If your company was to experience a cyber risk, your plan will be in place with a protocol on what to do if the worst happens. The downtime of recovering from the incident will decrease, and the cost will decrease as well.

When a plan is securely in place, it adds to the consistency of your company. Investors and employees alike can feel confident that their best interests are well-protected.

For example, if a fire were to occur in your operation to where the business could temporarily not operate, you’d have a plan in place of what to do. You’d know about threats to your business operations when production comes to a halt, what to do about potential worker’s compensation, and any other specific plans your business would need to go through.

Now imagine that same situation without having a plan to act on in place. You’d look unprofessional and lose revenue in the time you spend trying to clean up the mess. You need a plan in place in case an emergency occurs.

How Do I Get It?

Well, it’s pretty clear that your business needs continuity management. There are many places to turn in order to get consulting, but you don’t want to trust such an important element of your business to just anyone. You might be putting yourself in the hands of someone who doesn’t have experience and won’t be able to create a plan that will actually guard you.

That’s why you should turn to FAST for consulting. You’ll get someone to personally look at your business and work with your for your specific needs. A plan tailored to your exact business is much more effective than a general plan that someone didn’t really care about. They care at FAST. Trust your business to someone who cares as much as you do.