In order to manage the health and safety elements of your bar and customers, you need to first understand the basics of good practice.
Take a look at this article for effective steps you can take right now to ensure the health and safety of every patron in your bar.
Awareness and Training
Health and safety awareness in your bar can be enhanced by using a few simple but effective ideas.
The most important part of health and safety in the workplace is training. Maintaining proper standards and codes of practice is imperative to ensure accidents do not happen. It’s the responsibility of the owners to implement proper training.
Other than training and management, there are some more hands off methods you can use to make sure your bar is maintaining standards, not to mention complying with your legal requirements.
Proper Signage
Using a sign to let customers know they should be drinking responsibly is a great way to educate them on your health and safety policies. It’s also important to clearly display your policy so that customers know what their rights are when it comes to drinking on the premises.
Warning Notices
One way to increase the health and safety awareness in your bar is to post warning notices. These could be a reminder of the sanitation standards for food service workers, as well as drink orders that are served in glasses.
Cleaning Your Bar
Another important method to keep your bar safe is to be mindful of what you are doing when cleaning and managing the day to day movements in your bar. Cleaning regularly after customers have left will mean that the potential for leftover glass cups smashed on the ground is minimised. This obviously otherwise would create a whole heap of health and safety hazards for your bar so always clean regularly after customers have left the vicinity.
Some Things to Consider:
– Always have a back-up plan; cleaning can’t be left to chance in a bar as situations where there are wet floors can cause dangerous slips and major injuries to your customers.
– Clean regularly with proper equipment and supplies.
– Educate your employees on cleaning practices, such as how to properly wear gloves when working in food service areas and what to use when cleaning different areas.
– You should always be checking for spills, broken glasses and other hazards which can result in injury or worse.
Staying Safe and Future Proofing
There will always be accidents in a bar environment. It’s important that as a bar owner, you guard against them as much as possible and have the proper and correct protocols in place for when accidents do happen.
For Example:
– Have a display of health information up on the TV screen.
– Post a sign in your bar stating what the food items are made with.
– Utilise snap frames to display cleaning standards and schedules.
Once you have set some standards in your bar and install your safety signage/displays, it’s just a matter of maintaining those standards with effective quality control.
