Businesses put a lot of effort into building and maintaining a great reputation, but it can only take an unfortunate incident to damage it. In the workplace, nothing comes before employees’ safety and well-being. Or at least this should be the norm in every organisation. Unfortunately, many ventures fail to understand the importance of having clear health and safety policies in place.

Not prioritising this aspect can lead to workplace accidents, which have costly consequences, including compensation claims, lost productivity, damaged property, and tarnished reputation. It’s worth noting that such incidents don’t only cause suffering to the injured worker – they also affect the bottom line of a business. Therefore, it’s crucial to take employees’ health and safety seriously and avoid the significant implications of workplace accidents on your company.

Safety failures have a considerable impact on workers

According to the ILO, around 340 million work-related accidents happen annually. If employees are injured, the human costs are significant. But the costs of replacing the injured employee aren’t to be neglected either. The workload of the individual must be shared among other team members, and although this may be manageable in the short term, it can cause stress in the long run if the worker’s recovery is lengthy. Ongoing absence requires replacement, but recruiting new talent can become difficult when your business’ reputation is damaged due to failures in health and safety practices.

Workplace accidents leave only one impression on employees: they are not valued. On the other hand, hiring new employees means allocating resources (namely time and money) to provide effective training for them. But more often than not, in-store colleagues are the ones to deliver this training, and unfortunately, this is inefficient, as they don’t have a detailed understanding of OSHA violations. In this situation, two scenarios are possible: either the training isn’t fully delivered, or the new recruits fail to comprehend it entirely. This only causes more health and safety issues, adding to the pressure on employees to carry out their duties.

Workplace accidents can affect customers’ experience, too

If an employee is injured, customers can also experience the effects of such an incident, impacting their loyalty to your business. Even if employees try to cover multiple tasks, they can still miss some of the most important ones. In a store, this could mean empty shelves due to employees’ lack of time to restock or waiting too long for a checkout because only a few cashiers are available. Or, the negative experience could simply be due to an interaction with a stressed employee. Customers can easily get frustrated if such things happen, likely determining them to look for a better experience elsewhere.

Investing in health and safety: where to start?

According to https://www.how-to-sue.co.uk/, as an employer, you owe a duty of care to your employees. In other words, you are legally obligated to ensure they always work in safe conditions. This is important if you want to run a lucrative business and ensure both employees and customers have a positive experience at your company. After all, you depend on them to succeed! Employees who feel that their well-being matters are more likely to stay committed to their work. Having a health and safety plan in place is key to creating a positive work culture and boosting employee morale, which in turn, will result in reduced turnover rates and increased productivity, saving your business money in the long term.

Businesses are under great scrutiny, and a workplace accident can instantly ruin their reputation. Investing in health and safety is a way to demonstrate that you prioritise the well-being of employees, thus protecting your reputation. Here are some actionable steps you can take to reduce workplace accidents at your company:

• Carry out a risk assessment. This means evaluating the possible risks and hazards in the workplace that may cause harm to employees and brainstorming solutions to reduce them. Risk assessments are crucial for all businesses, as they can not only protect employees but also save your business money.
• Conduct regular inspections. It’s important to inspect equipment on a regular basis, as this helps ensure everything works properly. For instance, in the construction industry, workers use heavy machinery, so conducting inspections regularly can save lives.
• Provide effective training. As a business, you must legally train your employees on health and safety practices. However, more often than not, ventures treat training as if it were nothing but a box-ticking exercise. Unfortunately, this has significant consequences. It’s crucial to take this aspect seriously and provide employees with effective training. For instance, you can use mobile learning to offer them informative and engaging content on the best safety practices.
• Offer personal protective equipment to employees. Personal protective equipment, or PPE, is necessary to reduce exposure to workplace hazards. This equipment can include gloves, face masks, hard hats, and high-visual clothing, and it’s very effective in decreasing workplace injuries.
• Encourage workers to report accidents. Accident reporting allows you to determine whether the safety measures in your company are working. Moreover, it enables you to investigate how an accident happens, so you can remediate the problem and prevent similar incidents in the future. However, it’s important to ensure the process is accessible and efficient and provide training to workers on how to report accidents.
• Promote open communication. In many instances, businesses don’t include employees when implementing health and safety practices. However, since they are directly impacted, involving them in the process is essential. So, you should encourage open communication at your company and ask for honest feedback on what is and isn’t working. Using surveys can be incredibly effective because you can easily disperse them to workers and tailor them to your needs, making it easy to collect and evaluate the results.

Takeaway

Workplace injuries have consequences for employees and employers alike, so safety is a critical investment every business needs to make to avoid costly consequences. Ventures that use their resources to ensure workplace safety do better than those that don’t, both on a financial and organisational level, so it only makes sense to prioritise this aspect.

Machine learning is a rapidly growing field, and many companies are looking to hire talented individuals with expertise in this area. If you’re preparing for a machine learning interview, it’s essential to be familiar with common questions and how to answer them. To help you prepare, we’ve put together five common machine learning interview questions and their answers.

Question 1: What is overfitting, and how do you prevent it?

Overfitting occurs when a machine learning model becomes too complex and begins to overfit the training data. This results in poor generalization performance, where the model doesn’t perform well on new, unseen data, as it has become too specific to the training data.

Several techniques can be used to prevent overfitting:

• Cross-validation: This involves splitting the data into training and validation sets and using the validation set to evaluate the model’s performance. It helps to identify if the model is overfitting or underfitting.

• Regularization: This technique involves adding a penalty term to the loss function to discourage the model from fitting the training data too closely.

• Early stopping: This involves stopping the model’s training when the performance on the validation set starts to decrease, indicating that the model is beginning to overfit.

Question 2: What is cross-validation, and why is it important?

Cross-validation is a technique used for evaluating the performance of a machine-learning model. It involves splitting the data into training, testing sets multiple times, and evaluating the model’s performance on each split. This technique helps to ensure that the model generalizes well to new, unseen data and is not overfitting.

Cross-validation is essential because it provides a more accurate estimate of the model’s performance than a single train-test split. It also helps to identify potential issues with the model, such as overfitting or underfitting.

Question 3: What is the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning?

Supervised learning involves training a model on labeled data, where the output variable is known. The goal is to learn a function that maps input variables to the output variable. The model can then be used to predict the output variable for new, unseen data.

On the other hand, unsupervised learning is training a model on unlabeled data with an unknown output variable. The goal is to learn the underlying structure or patterns in the data without any specific target variable in mind.

Question 4: What is gradient descent, and how does it work?

Gradient descent is a popular optimization algorithm used in machine learning to find the optimal values of the parameters of a model. The basic idea behind gradient descent is to iteratively update the parameters in the direction of the negative gradient of the loss function, which represents the rate of change of the loss concerning the parameters.

The following are the steps involved in gradient descent:

• Initialize the parameters with some values.

• Compute the loss function for the current values of the parameters.
• Compute the gradient of the loss function concerning the parameters.
• Update the parameters by taking a small step in the direction of the negative gradient.
• Repeat steps 2-4 until convergence, i.e., the loss function no longer decreases.

Question 5: What evaluation metrics would you use to evaluate a classification model?

Evaluation metrics measure how well a machine-learning model performs. In the case of a classification model, the following evaluation metrics can be used:

• Accuracy: This metric measures the proportion of correctly classified samples.

• Precision: This metric estimates the proportion of true positives among all predicted positives.

• Recall: This metric measures the proportion of true positives among all actual positives.

• F1 score: This metric is a harmonic mean of precision and recall that provides a balanced view of the model’s performance.

• Confusion matrix: This metric provides a detailed view of the model’s performance by showing the true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative values.

Take Away

Preparing for a machine learning interview requires a deep understanding of the position. By familiarizing yourself with machine learning interview questions and practicing your answers, you can demonstrate your suitability for the role and increase your chances of landing the job.

However, it’s not just about preparing for the interview itself. Another critical aspect is to develop your knowledge and skills in machine learning to demonstrate your commitment to the profession and make yourself a more attractive candidate to potential employers. One way to do this is by enrolling in machine learning certification courses offered by top institutes in India. These courses can help you acquire new skills and knowledge to enhance your resume and make you stand out in a competitive job market.

The world of work has been changing lately. While technological developments and paradigm shifts in business models have changed the landscape of work globally, workers both globally and nationally have found their worth and their voice. Despite the rise of AI and automation, the worker is worth more than ever, and some businesses are struggling as a result. What is it that employees look for in a role today, and how might a business adopt them to improve their own employee turnover?

Flexibility

One of the most important factors to workers today is flexibility. This has been borne out by the runaway popularity of remote and hybrid working schemes, which were introduced as a result of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With businesses demonstrating that remote work is possible without impacting productivity, more workers today expect accommodations for remote work as a standard part of their contract.

Stability

Stability is another major factor that employees bear in mind when considering a role. It can appear in two distinct ways: a comfortable wage, and guaranteed job security. Offering a competitive wage means employees can worry less about their living standards or future, allowing them to settle into their role. A robust development pipeline and internal career trajectory can also show employees that staying would be to their benefit.

Benefits

Salary alone is not enough to entice applicants to a job today, though. It is also necessary for a role to offer a number of competitive perks and benefits in order to sweeten the deal. These can range from small perks to major additions. On the smaller side, healthcare workers might get a Nandos NHS discount as a small token; on the more essential side, workers might get offered private healthcare coverage for themselves and their family.

Trust

Trust as a factor touches on the company culture within and office or department, and the management style of both middle and executive managers. If an employee feels micromanaged by their line manager or any superior, they are less likely to feel trusted in their role, and more likely to look for somewhere that is a better fit. A conversational management style and a transparent structure for departments can go a long way to demonstrating trust.

Shared Values

This last factor is one that has gained prescience in recent years, as employees seek to match their personal values with their career trajectory. Social justice and good causes can form interstitial parts of an employee’s identity, and in an age where information is more readily available than ever, workers are able to see the impacts a business has outside of its secondary role as ‘job-giver’.

With a principled workforce unwilling to tacitly lend credence to damaging acts or activities – key focuses at present being the climate crisis and rising racial tensions -, individual job-seekers are seeking roles where their values are shared by their prospective employer. This is both to pressure organisations into adopting those values, and to ensure that their own are not being compromised in their professional lives.

To conclude, I would like to share with you a wonderful hiring resource. Recruiting by Ryan Breslow, the founder of Bolt and Love, is a great starting resource for hiring great talent for your company.