As a business owner, you have a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, especially if you have employees. As a small business owner, you need to think about every decision you make. Because each decision will not only affect you, but it will affect your business as well. This means your employees and customers can be affected. This is a stressful domino effect, but it’s something very important that all business owners need to understand.

When it comes to your employees, they need to feel safe, but they also need to know that their job is going to be a reliable source of income. To keep high retention rates, happy employees, happy customers, and avoid any potential lawsuits, here are some things that business owners will need to look into as a part of their responsibilities.

Physical Safety

You have to make sure that your employees feel safe when they’re at work. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, many employees feel completely unsafe, which is entirely understandable. A scared employee is not going to be productive and it’s also just going to make the work environment feel tense. You’ll need to develop some sort of a safety protocol that employees can agree and follow.

Physical safety can and should also extend to the outside of COVID-related issues. You need to make sure that your building is fully safe, meaning that the fire alarms work, the sprinkler system works, and there are no hazards such as black mold in the walls. Plumbing equipment for your building can also affect the safety of the building, which is why  Carr Company plumbing equipment should be something to look into for your office’s plumbing.  Air quality is something that will need to be kept into consideration too. The bad air quality will lead to numerous health-related problems such as trouble breathing and potential cancers and form.

Emotional Safety

You need to make sure that your employees also feel emotionally safe. This can include allowing employees to make mistakes without penalizing them. Having the work environment be positive so everyone understands toxic work traits are not allowed, letting employees be heard, and including more diversity in the office. Your employees should be allowed to express themselves and be individuals, individualism is something that should be embraced in the office.

This is something that Google allows for their employees. This not only makes the employees feel happy, and has high retention rates, but it also allows for them to feel completely emotionally safe. Looking into having an on-site therapist or having a counselor center affiliated with your business can help a lot so your employees know where to go to seek professional help.

Protect Vulnerable Employees

There have been numerous businesses over the last few years that have this “fraternity” culture or will allow upper management to do anything that they want. This sadly extends to stalking and sexual harassment of lower-level employees. This is something that should never be tolerated. Not only is this going to damage your reputation, the reputation of your business, have you be a part of a lawsuit, but you can expect that your business will begin to crumble. Do not allow upper management to do what they want, and do not try to sweep anything underneath the rug. Even if you’re not personally involved in any scandals, you’re still going to be dragged into it and it will be detrimental to your business.