While it’s important to keep your restaurant kitchen safe, it’s impossible to expect to entirely prevent accidents from taking place. But with a little bit of research and extra work, it’s often straightforward to put in place steps and procedures to help protect your employees and your business.

So, what are some simple ways that you can work to reduce the risk of accidents in your kitchen?

Always reinforce best-practice

One of the biggest dangers faced by staff working in a busy kitchen is the constant risk of physical injury from slips, burns, cuts, and falls. While core health and safety training involves straightforward steps to prevent accident from taking place, these are often not followed in the long-term by staff or management.

This can easily be avoided by putting in place a system to ensure that best-practice habits are adhered to post- training, but choosing a dedicated member of staff for each key task. While this may seem arduous, research states that forming a fully retentive habit just takes a little more than two months. Meaning that if your team can make it past the 66 day mark, you’ll be much more likely to fully adopt best practice and keep your team safe.

Stay ahead of regular maintenance

While accidents can be caused by employees making mistakes, risk can be exponentially increased by items that are only checked when their maintenance date is coming due. Machinery that is approaching its service date can often become unreliable or be overlooked if it is set to be serviced in a short period of time. And ventilation duct cleaning, or oven cleaning can lead to residue build-up if put off.

For example, noisy or inefficiently operating machinery can obscure the sound of verbal warnings, or impede important communication. And any noise source over 85 db – no more than a vacuum cleaner – can cause damage to hearing. Making sure that regular equipment reviews are conducted outside of mandatory maintenance periods can help go a long way toward mitigating this risk and ensure sure that all equipment is operating at peak capacity. Having these be carried out by multiple individuals helps increase the visibility of faults that may be tolerated by one employee familiar with their use; resulting in greater efficiency and a safer working environment.

Provide safe channels for communication

For many employees, stress and fatigue can be a showstopper; leading to increased risk of accidents and eventual staff turnover. While working in a busy kitchen can be an enjoyable, exciting experience, making sure that channels are in place to make sure that employees are able to comfortably and safely discuss problems is critical. It is also well worth taking the time to meaningfully review leave and sickness policy, with 25.7 million days lost to illness between 2016/17 due in part to individuals not taking enough time to fully recover before returning to work. This means that it is often worth taking the time to consider the cost of affording staff leave against the degree of risk in having them stay.